Various and sundry

Here are some facts and quotes that you might find interesting:

Apple iPods' main component is the memory chip, manufactured by a company called PortalPlayer. Apple ships components to a Chinese company called Inventec and PortalPlayer ships their designs to Taiwan for fabrication. PortalPlayer probably pays around $3 to the Taiwanese company for fabrication per chip and they charge Apple $12 for the chip [$9 profit for them]. Apple pays Inventec in China around $200 per player [includes cost of chip] to assemble and ship back the players. Inventec makes an estimated profit of less than $10 per player, even though labour is cheap. iPods retail sale price in the US is $265, so Apple ends up making $65 as profit. Now , is it any wonder that Apple shares trade at above $60 today, compared to $20 last year?.


Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, responding to a question that "outsourcing is killing America": "I think it's a ruse, a complete and total ruse by people who don't want to face what the real problems are. The real problem is that 30% of the people getting a college degree in China and India are getting an engineering degree. That number in the United States is 4%. The fact is, we don't value engineering, and that is how manufacturing jobs get created."


All you iFlex dudes, welcome to Oracle! Oracle is buying iFlex at six times its closing price of Rs.829 per share. Oracle bought PeopleSoft and Retek, for only twice their existing revenue price.


In 1999, IT services accounted for 1.3% of India's GDP. Last year, IT accounted for 3% of the GDP. In the US, IT accounts for 40% of the GDP. India's literacy rate is increasing at 1.3% per year, meaning that it will take another 20 years for India to reach 95% literacy. India's automobile industry is showing a growth of 20% per year.


NIIT is among the Top 20 Companies in the world, and the only one from India, for outsourcing training capabilities, according to TrainingOutsourcing.com. This is significant, especially as eLearning, a $26 billion dollar industry today, is set to take off. Analysts predict India has a good chance of becoming the eLearning hub of the world by 2008, with business expected to be around $28 billion.