Phone makers seek worldwide coordination

As the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation economies forged a blueprint for improving global value chains, manufacturers of smartphones were already seeking ways to get the job done.

China is a key market to which every global smartphone maker wants access, not only because the country has 1.3 billion potential customers, but because it also dominates global smartphone manufacturing.

As the world eagerly waited to see what Apple's iPhone 6 would look like in early September, thousands of young workers at a Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, Henan province, were busy assembling the final components of the "next big thing".