Apple perhaps did it better, stronger, than other companies, in the specific consumer mobile IT field. But every single industry has been doing this, for decades.

Displacing/offshoring production, in hardware as well as software, to "reduce costs" for manufacturing (motors, equipments, appliances, cars, factories components, etc.) as well as engineering started way back in the 1950's, after having been theorised a century before (Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage).