China

“The only way for Americans to be globally competitive with China is Literally just a labor equation, right? If we want to keep high wages in America, but compete globally, then we have to have high wage people that are using software and robotics to get a 10 X…”

“I would argue that's why companies like Anduril are so important, because the future battleground are going to require a new type of weapon, a new type of defense system, that if we don't develop it, the Russians will, the Chinese will, the Koreans will, and I…”

“China can offer. Like you can get a Tesla model three equivalent vehicle for like 25 K delivered and the vehicle quality is fantastic today.”

“The national security part, we should put in I, it's one person's opinion, but we need to make sure we win this race against against China in particular. And I, there almost no dollar price is wrong in that using that lens”

“I mean, we're talking about like a quantum shipbuilding of like, I think it's 1700 last year of commercial and military vessels versus five.”

“We just have to last till about 2037, 20 42, and then kind of overnight China's working population will cut in half, and then they can try again in another thousand years. So that will put a lot of pressure in our opinion on Xi to actually do something, becaus…”

“We're getting destroyed by China in shipbuilding. They can outproduce us 200 to one. They have about 370, ah, warships. We have about 290. They can produce almost 20 to 30 a year. We produce six to eight.”

“90% of all refining is done in China, right? And about 70% plus or minus of the mining of critical minerals and earth elements is done in China.”

“And you look at China's grid in 2010, U S and China were neck and neck. Just that's where the two lines cross on the chart, 2010. And since then China's doubled its grid while we stayed flat. So now they have two X the energy production that we have, and it's …”

“There's a certain extent to which China doesn't actually want my IP because they have something better already running in the mainland.”

“They're also turning on innovative types of reactors that were invented in the United States in the seventies and eighties. And they sort of sat on the shelf and we never really tackled them. We ran into a bunch of regulatory roadblocks and then we never turne…”

“China was producing over 90, up to 94% of the global supply and the US was producing less than one percent.”

“Today, China mines 55 to 60% of the rare earths. They manufacture 90 to 94% of the magnets. They're actually importing the difference.”

“If China manufactures, 94% of the global supply of these magnets, where do you think all of the equipment to make those magnets comes from? It's virtually a hundred percent.”

“If you're just copying and pasting China into the United States and trying to build a manufacturing business around that, you are doomed. You will absolutely fail because when you think about the unit economics, labor costs, Environmental regulations. Permits.…”

“China is retrofitting the equivalent of their MQ-Nine Reaper. So like our most advanced military drones, The equivalent of that in China, the Wing Long II they're using for cloud seeding missions.”

“Apple trained all of their suppliers, and then the suppliers in turn supplied Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo. So that's why Nokia couldn't keep up. It's that China had this amazing ecosystem built for the smartphone industry, all paid for by Apple.”

“What attracted Apple to move to China in the 2000 was not tech competence. It was just abundant labor, the cost of that labor and an industrial policy that was very welcoming to foreign direct investment.”

“They do their own supply chain study, sort of Apple internally, and realize that they're investing fifty-five billion dollars a year into Chinese factories, and once they've sort of established this, and they realize, like, how much that could mean to local an…”

“You can't really blame them at all for adopting the outsourcing model, because without it, they would be bankrupt. I mean, the book begins after a pretty fun prologue. They're days away from bankruptcy. And it's because they're building everything themselves.”

“If you just sort of took 22% of revenue, which is what fifty five billion was in that year. And just sort of use that as a sort of, you know, back of the envelope math, back to 2007, the birth of the iPhone, and you took it all the way to 2025, you'd get above…”

“I don't think they can move to India. They certainly can't move to the US. Their production plants are basically encircled by Chinese competitors that they themselves created, and they're in a position where they can't make any good moves.”

“The tech capabilities aren't there. Apple builds them.”

“Like that's not supposed to be the case, but I would talk to Apple people who'd been to the Nokia line. I would talk to Nokia people who'd been to the Apple line. Like that's not supposed to happen. And yet it comes up all the time in anecdotes.”

“My narrative is not a book about Apple exploiting China. It's a book about China exploiting Apple, right, and getting technology transfer through these arrangements.”

“There's an element, one, of folks doing me too, like Andrew's very me too to China. They said, we're going to go toe to toe. We're going to manufacturing in volume. We're going to build computers. We're going to build drones. We're going to build everything th…”

“The microprocessors, the computers, you cannot buy an American made computer. You have to go overseas. You have to go to China and military doesn't want to buy A foreign made computer, but there isn't any option, so they have to do by exception”

“China's building, I've heard, sixty million drones per year is not outside of the question of China being able to do, but, ah, and US maybe 50,000 drones in a year. So there's a huge disparity there.”

“China, their ability to build ships is much, much faster than ours. A lot of the raw materials we need for our own shipbuilding comes from China, the steel and many of the metals. A lot of the things we need for batteries, for motors, for a lot of the ingredie…”

“If they all come from China, and we ever get into a real conflict with China, whether it's an economic conflict or an actual kinetic conflict, like, They're going to cut us off.”

“I'm not sure that the right strategy for America is to say, oh, they can build a hundred ships a year, so we need to be able to build a hundred ships a year. Like, what I would say a better strategy is if China's able to build a hundred ships a year, what if w…”

“I think we're gonna have lights out factories the way they do in China.”

“If you've ever been to Shenzhen, which I went to even before I joined in recent Horowitz and saw the manufacturing capabilities of advanced, advanced manufacturing, robotics manufacturing you know, and then now we see the defense like shipbuilding manufacturin…”

“And then also MP materials, which by the way, like manufacturers, a lot of their magnets through China.”

“So they've developed certain capabilities in certain hypersonic missile categories, ah, at a price that, ah, that we haven't achieved yet, which is why one of my critical technology areas is high, scaled hypersonics at cost.”

“The three I'm most proud of, ah, in a very recent term, is we've done three deals for critical minerals, ah, to reduce our dependency on China in like, 45 days.”

“Even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability To just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next 50 or a hundred years.”

“Even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don't have the ability To just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next 50 or a hundred years.”

“China is playing a subsidized subsidization game with all of their kind of domestic national champions and they're also running a very effective 40 chess strategy with the Belt and Road Initiative, which has put the United States and our allies and partners in…”

“China's hundreds of times ahead of it. Hundreds of times more capacity than us.”

“Yeah, so in China they have Made it mandatory that ships of a certain size have to be strong enough and fortified enough to be able to carry military assets as well as civilian assets.”

“China's the only country that I think we probably won't be in maybe ever, but certainly anytime soon.”

“I think that my honest assessment is I think we're not yet at like in the West, we're leading in terms of drone manufacturing. I don't think we're as good at China as drone manufacturing yet, but I don't think there's any law of physics that says we can't get …”

“We find ourselves in a position of really being the only company in the world, certainly the only company outside of China that's capable of delivering these things reliably at scale.”

“Every single time military superiority is front run by industrial superiority. We did that in World War II. The problem is now that China is doing that today.”

“If we were to engage in a large scale conflict, I think it's something like 11 days. Like, we would run out of munitions in 11 days.”

“We have been effectively losing war games when they model the scenario of US versus China since, I think like, 2015. We have been, the US loses those war games.”

“The problem with that is that if we get into any conflict with China, there's suddenly a huge swath of our naval assets that we don't want to put anywhere near China, Because they could just demolish it. And so it invalidate even a lot of the exquisite assets …”

“The Chinese have developed missiles that they affectionately refer to as carrier killers, that literally it's, I mean, these still might be fairly expensive missiles, right, these are 15, twenty million dollar missiles, But they can destroy a multi-billion dol…”

“Ukraine was like the military industrial complex in production where it's like they're live testing stuff. Way more rapidly, even than, like, even the US at its best, even China or wherever. In Ukraine, it's just, we try something and we immediately field it, …”

“Half of our naval fleet could be destroyed within the first couple months of a large-scale conflict with China, and it would take us 25 years to rebuild just to get back to where we were. So our shipbuilding capacity doesn't exist.”

“The second thing that we are really pushing for that I'm hoping we can get across the line is an AI framework for federal government. And the third thing that really I'd like to see us move faster on is Permitting around things like critical minerals energy, t…”

“China now has consistent access to space, and has a massive program to essentially duplicate our launch capacity. They've got, you know, five different companies trying to be SpaceX over there that they're throwing lots and lots of money at.”

“And then what's really going to happen is China will sell our art back to us. So they're going to steal it all anyway, because they don't care. And they're just going to basically come back to us with these models, which we've seen with DeepSeek and everything…”

“I'm looking at the current pipeline. I see 30, 40 potential IPOs this year in China.”

“And then what you might have is ultimately you can mix and match Chinese physical robot with a Western brain. And I know that's happening.”

“China figured out how to do everything from America and then improved on it. They iterated really quickly and they made a better system”

“We've tried to go quite far, and we think further than anyone else, where, like, you can look at our boards, you can look at all of the chips that go onto our boards, those will not Have ever touched China. Our motors are made outside of China. The material th…”

“China is supplying drones and components to both sides. So to Ukraine and to Russia, and they have by far the strongest drone and just electronics industrial base.”

“Printed circuit boards, they use precursor materials. The manufacturing uses precursor materials that is completely dominated by China. So, even if you go to one of these board shops in America that, that specializes in, you know, ITAR, Exquisite, like, they c…”

“I mean, I think, like, it's a morally corrupt approach but although it would also be far worse for Ukraine if they didn't have access to Chinese components.”

“China has been the biggest beneficiary because they've been supplying both sides of the war and probably making, I mean, tens of millions of drones per year easily, maybe in the hundreds of millions.”

“China outbuilds us 230 to one. Our naval fleet is actually shrinking and we have 0.1% of global shipbuilding capacity as a non-existent industry.”

“Their entire shipbuilding industry is completely subsidized. Not only direct construction subsidies, but they subsidize the raw materials, they subsidize the labor, and they basically give them free financing for these shipyards.”

“They built over a thousand commercial ships last year, and the United States built five. I think this was 20, 24. Five. Like one, two, three, four, Five large ocean going commercial vessels.”

“Our allies, South Korea and Japan, the next two largest shipbuilders in the world. They're actually on the commercial side. They're actually getting a lot of their modules from China. They're getting a lot of their labor from China.”

“We being the U.S. Launch about five to 10 military, meaning destroyer, cruiser, aircraft carrier, like straight naval vessel warship. China's probably doing about 30, so six to one, seven to one, somewhere in there.”

“China has 57% of total global shipbuilding capacity.”

“China outbuilds the US 230 to one.”

“They built over a thousand commercial ships last year, and the United States built five. I think this was 20, 24. Five. Like one, two, three, four, Five. Large, ocean-going commercial vessels.”

“Our allies, South Korea and Japan, the next two largest shipbuilders in the world, they're actually, on the commercial side, they're actually getting a lot of their modules from China. They're getting a lot of their labor from China.”

“China outbuilds the US 230 to one.”

“China has 57% of total global shipbuilding capacity.”