How Apple tied its fortunes to China

Tim Cook in 2007, when he was chief operating officer and building Apple’s supply chain in China © FT montage: Getty Images

In 2007, Nokia had 900mn users. Its market dominance seemed so great that Forbes ran a cover story on the company asking “Can anyone catch the cell phone king?” The same year, Apple launched the iPhone.

Sixteen years and 1.2bn users later, the story of how the Finnish handset maker got blindsided by the iPhone is well known. Nokia, the story goes, didn’t have enough software savvy to keep up with visionary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and design whizz Jony Ive.