Starting in the middle of March 2008, containers began arriving for Apple with a description the company had never used on a shipping record before: "electric computers." A shipping data startup noticed. By late May it had counted 188 of them.
The containers
The records were ordinary. Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer, shipped 20 containers on March 19, 2008. Forty-four more followed on March 27, April 28, May 6 and May 17, with 16 of them routed to a distributor in Pennsylvania. Hon Hai, better known as Foxconn, filled in the rest. Every container carried the same odd label.
ImportGenius, then a new company selling access to U.S. import records, put the pattern together and told Fortune. Its founder concluded the containers held 3G iPhones. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 3G at WWDC on June 9, 2008, about six weeks after the story ran.
Nothing was hacked and nothing was leaked by a person. The supplier, the volume, the ports and the timing were sitting in a public record that anyone with a subscription could read.
What Apple did next
Two years later, ahead of the first iPad, Apple made its import records private. Fortune reported in February 2010 that Apple was, at the time, the only major electronics company to have protected its shipping data. Forbes wrote the same year that Apple had arranged with U.S. Customs for its shipping records to stay out of public view.
The most valuable company on earth looked at its shipping records and decided they were worth protecting.Our reading of the 2010 coverage. Apple has never commented on it.
That decision is the whole point of this post. Apple did not stop shipping. It did not change suppliers or ports. It simply stopped letting the record be read by everyone.
The leak moved. It did not stop.
Records that stay public keep talking. In 2013 a trade data company pulled 969 shipping records consigned to Apple between May 28 and August 26 and found three described as "set top box," months ahead of a new Apple TV. Product descriptions still leak even when a company is careful.
The bigger shift was geographic. India publishes its own import records, and for most of the last decade that is where phone launches leaked.
- 2015A Huawei device codenamed "Angler" showed up in Indian records with a 5.5-inch screen, 3GB of memory and a $645 unit value. Google announced it as the Nexus 6P on September 29.
- 2019Google's Pixel 3a and 3a XL arrived in India for testing at $300 and $350 valuations, a month before launch. Reporters used the numbers to predict the price.
- 2022Seven unreleased Apple model numbers, three iPhones and two iPads, were imported into India "for testing." Apple announced all of them on March 8.
If you are not Apple
Your record has the same shape as Apple's. Supplier, port, volume, product description, product code, arrival date. The difference is that Apple's story made the news and yours will not. A new product code on your record is a press release you did not write, and the reader is whoever searched your name that week.
We put a federal confidentiality protection in place for every entity and name you ship under, and we keep watching the platforms after that. Your suppliers, your volumes and your next launch stop appearing where competitors look first.
Sources
- Apple takes delivery of 188 mysterious ocean containers · Fortune, May 23, 2008
- ImportGenius: the disruptive shipping database · TechCrunch, May 28, 2008
- Apple conceals iPad freight records · Fortune, Feb 18, 2010
- Twilight shipping: Apple, technology and Panjiva · Forbes, Jun 21, 2010
- U.S. import data: Apple season · Datamyne, 2013
- Zauba listing points to Huawei Nexus 6 with 5.5-inch display, 3GB RAM, $645 price tag · Tech Times, Sep 8, 2015
- The Google Pixel 3a and 3a XL may be cheaper than expected · Notebookcheck, Apr 2019
- iPhone SE and iPad Air imported into India ahead of launch · MacRumors, Feb 1, 2022
