Facebook's hardware ambitions are undercut by its anti-China strategy - The Washington ... - 0 views
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For more than a year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a point of stoking fears about China. He’s told U.S. lawmakers that China “steals” American technology and played up nationalist concerns about threats from Chinese-owned rival TikTok.
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Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China.So the company is racing to get out.
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Facebook has hit walls, say three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
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Until recently, the people said, Meta executives viewed the company’s reliance on China to make Oculus virtual reality headsets as a relatively minor concern because the company’s core focus was its social media and messaging apps.
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“Meta is building a complicated hardware product. You can’t just turn on a dime and make it elsewhere,”
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Facebook’s public criticism of China began in 2019 when Zuckerberg warned, in a speech at Georgetown University, that China was exporting a dangerous vision for the internet to the rest of the world — and noted that Facebook was abandoning its efforts to break into that country’s market.
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The anti-China stance has since extended into a full-blown corporate strategy. Nick Clegg, the company’s president, wrote an op-ed attacking China in The Washington Post in 2020, the same year Zuckerberg attacked China in a congressional antitrust hearing.
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At the antitrust hearing in Congress in 2020, Zuckerberg used his opening remarks to attack China in terms that went much further than his industry peers. He said it was “well-documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies,” and repeated that the country was “building its own version of the internet” that went against American values. He described Facebook as a “proudly American” company and noted that TikTok was the company’s fastest-growing rival.
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“They were trying to find things that [Zuckerberg] could agree with Trump on, and it’s a pretty slim list,” said one of the people, describing how the company landed on its anti-China strategy. “If you’re not going to try to be in this country anyway, you might as well use it to your political advantage by contrasting yourself with Apple and TikTok.”