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What's with the PVG-ANC route? Is Apple doing U.S. fulfillment out of Alaska? Those phones still need to reach the mainland, so I think you need to double the t
by thedogeye 11y ago
What's with the PVG-ANC route? Is Apple doing U.S. fulfillment out of Alaska? Those phones still need to reach the mainland, so I think you need to double the ton-kilometer number to get them down here.
- ubernostrum 11y agoShanghai is the point of departure from China, and Anchorage is the point of entry in the US (both are significant cargo hubs). So that's the route you can rely on the shipments taking; from Anchorage they could go anywhere in the US, and so it's not really possible to estimate how much further they travel on average. Even if we assume worst case for 100% of iPhones -- that is, that every iPhone bound for the United States ends up in the southeastern corner of the country in order to maximize the distance flown (since that's the furthest point from ANC) -- the incoming leg from Shanghai is still longer than the onward journey from Anchorage. Which means that the estimate for PVG-ANC represents the majority of the RTK of iPhones bound for the US, which means the hard ceiling on the total RTK even if we assume every single iPhone is delivered to someone in Miami to max out the distance, is around 300m RTK, which is still a rounding error of the global air-cargo total of 208 billion. No matter how much you try to push it to be a bigger number, "the scale of Apple" is just not significant in terms of percentage of global air cargo.