Trump threatens Apple with a tariff of 25%if it does not build iPhones in America

Cnn
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President Donald Trump asked on Friday to make Apple in the USA his iPhones or to confront a 25% tariff.

“I announced Tim Cook from Apple a long time ago that I would expect your iPhone to be sold in the United States of America that will be built in the USA, not in India or elsewhere,” Trump posted on Friday morning for the social of truth. “If this is not the case, a tariff of at least 25% of Apple must be paid to the USA.”

Trump announced last week during his trip to the Middle East that he was dissatisfied with Cook, the CEO of Apple, because the company's plan, Iphones in the USA is to be sold in newly built plants in India.

In recent years, Apple has worked to diversify its production capacities. Some iPhone production had already moved to India, and Cook about Apple's call call with investors in the early this month said he expected “the majority of the iPhones sold in the USA in India as a country of origin.”

During this call, Cook expected Apple to be exposed to a tariff of up to 900 million US dollars this quarter. However, it could have been significantly worse: Apple and other US technology companies achieved a big victory last month when Trump freed the electronics from his massive tariffs in China.

Despite the lowering of its tariff to at least 30% in most Chinese goods – compared to 145% in the early this month – the majority of the goods that enter the United States remains a universal tariff of 10%. According to Wedbush Securities estimates, around 90% of Apple's iPhone production and assembly group are based in China.

Trump met with Cook in Riad last week at the start of the President's departure in the Middle East. In Qatar he called Cook for his plan to build us in India.

“I had a little problem with Tim Cook,” said Trump in Qatar last week. “I said to him: 'Tim, you are my friend. I treated you very well. You come in with $ 500 billion.' But now I hear that they build all over India.

Cook met again in the White House on Tuesday, an administrative officer told CNN. The official did not reveal the topic of the meeting.

In an interview with Fox News on Friday morning, the finance minister Scott Bessent said that Trump was trying to “bring back precision in the United States”.

“I think one of our biggest weaknesses is this external production, especially for semiconductors, and a large part of Apple's components is in semiconductors,” said Bessent. “So we want Apple to help us make the semiconductor supply chain safer.”

Some of Apple's chips have already been produced in the USA, thanks to its partnership with TSMC, which recently opened a chip makeing system in Arizona. The company did not immediately answer a request for comments.

The most valuable publicly traded company in the world is confused in enormous profit with cash and rakes – more than any company in history. But Apple has long said that it cannot produce iPhones in America.

Apple has invested billions of dollars who trained millions of qualified engineers abroad. With their massive population groups, China and India simply have more qualified engineers than the United States. And it costs Apple considerably less to pay these employees.

Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple, made the problem known in a meeting in October 2010 with former President Barack Obama. He called America's lackluster education system as an obstacle for Apple, which needed 30,000 industrial engineers to support the factory workers on site.

“You can't find that many are hired in America,” said Jobs to Obama, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson. “If you could clarify these engineers, we could move more production facilities here.”

In an interview with Tech journalist from Tech with Tech Swisher and Walt Mossberg from 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook said with the evaluation of jobs. When asked whether the day would ever come if an Apple product is produced in the USA, he said: “I want it to be there … and you can bet that we will use the entire influence on it.”

The term that Apple can convert iPhone production is a “fictional story”.

The US Made Imphones could cost more than three times their current price of around $ 1,000, since it would be necessary to replicate the highly complex production ecosystem that is currently available in Asia.

“You build this (supply chain) in the USA with a factory in West Virginia and New Jersey.

And even then Apple would cost about 30 billion US dollars and three years to bring only 10% of its supply chain to the USA, Ives told Burnett.

Ives confirmed this attitude in a statement after Trump's tariff threat on Friday and said: “The concept that Apple produces iPhones in the USA is a fairy tale that is not feasible.” He estimated that moving the entire iPhone production from Apple to the USA would take five to ten years.

An additional 25% tariff for Apple products could lead to higher prices for US iPhone buyers. Rumors have already been considered that Apple is considering increasing prices if it released its new iPhones series in autumn – a step that could continue to delete Trump, although the company will probably avoid the increase directly to tariffs.

While Apple may not be able to postpone iPhone production to the USA, Apple announced an investment of 500 billion US dollars to expand its US institutions at the beginning of this year to appease Trump.

The company said that the investment would create a new facility for the production of servers – previously outside the USA – in Houston to support Apple Intelligence, its new brand of artificial intelligence products. The capacity of the data center in several states will also expand and plan to invest in corporate facilities and the production of Apple TV+ shows in 20 states.

This story has been updated with additional details and context.