You've never worked at a FedEx or UPS hub. Everything gets x-ray going in and out, you go through metal detector in and out, no open containers/phones/electronics/watches etc you can have a wedding band and only a wedding band. When stuff does go missing from a hub/sort facility, the carrier often finds the thief very quickly because everything is constantly being scanned and you know exactly where it last was and where it should have gone next and exactly what people are in that area so you can go right to the appropriate cameras with a known, relatively narrow, time frame.
Doing similar in a factory is trivial and there's going to be a lot less risk of the middle/upper management/security being corruptable. No offense to a random Chinese citizen but, the pay is garbage - a quick google query shows the average factory worker salary equates to $255 to $283. If you can walk out with a prototype of something, I bet you could have it sold within an hour for $1000 with minimal effort and if you were remotely organized could probably fetch several times that within a day. You may have just made several years salary to divide among 2-5 people.
In the United States, someone is going to have a hard time getting it in the hands of competition and at best they might get a grand or two from a less-than-reputable website/media company which isn't worth being fired for and/or facing criminal prosecution.
Yes and? 'several times 1000' is multiple year's salary starting at $6800, $6800 for a prototype of a flagship device, or even a structural prototype of a flagship device, isn't unreasonable.
Now compare that to minimum wage in the United States which would be 4x (and then some) what the Chinese factory worker is making and, every factory job I've ever seen pays well more than minimum wage here (a quick Glassdoor search shoes 'The national average salary for a Factory Worker is $39,719', more than 10x a Chinese worker). Making an American worker far less inclined to risk termination and prison.
And in the case of the article, it mentions an individual stealing thousands of casings. You just aren't going to get enough money out of that to make it worth it for multiple American workers to try and smuggle thousands of units out of a factory, the risk to reward ratio just isn't going to work but at a dollar each and only 1000 units a Chinese worker is walking away with 3 months and change of salary.
You've never worked at a FedEx or UPS hub. Everything gets x-ray going in and out, you go through metal detector in and out, no open containers/phones/electronics/watches etc you can have a wedding band and only a wedding band. When stuff does go missing from a hub/sort facility, the carrier often finds the thief very quickly because everything is constantly being scanned and you know exactly where it last was and where it should have gone next and exactly what people are in that area so you can go right to the appropriate cameras with a known, relatively narrow, time frame.
Doing similar in a factory is trivial and there's going to be a lot less risk of the middle/upper management/security being corruptable. No offense to a random Chinese citizen but, the pay is garbage - a quick google query shows the average factory worker salary equates to $255 to $283. If you can walk out with a prototype of something, I bet you could have it sold within an hour for $1000 with minimal effort and if you were remotely organized could probably fetch several times that within a day. You may have just made several years salary to divide among 2-5 people.
In the United States, someone is going to have a hard time getting it in the hands of competition and at best they might get a grand or two from a less-than-reputable website/media company which isn't worth being fired for and/or facing criminal prosecution.