The directness of the current US President Donald Trump sometimes creates inconvenience for his partners, this week he unwittingly revealed the intentions of Apple management in terms of plans to adapt the company’s business to the tariff policy of the new US president. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be sent by Apple to the country’s economy.
Image Source: Apple
As Bloomberg reports, Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook had a conversation last Thursday, and on Friday, at a meeting with governors, the US President said that the company was going to move some of its production from Mexico to its historical homeland. According to Trump, Apple has “already shut down two plants in Mexico.” As the President noted, the Apple CEO promised to invest several hundred million dollars in the US economy. In doing so, the American leader added, Apple will try to avoid the negative impact of customs duties on its business. According to Trump, Apple is about to start building something in the US, and a corresponding statement from the company’s representatives should follow in the near future.
Let us recall that shortly after taking office as US President for the second time, Trump announced his intention to introduce 25% duties on goods from Mexico and Canada, but then gave the countries and interested companies a month’s grace to take the appropriate measures. It is difficult to understand what kind of migration of Apple production from Mexico to the US Trump was talking about, since the southern neighbor is home to mainly the production facilities of Taiwan’s Foxconn, which are related to the production of server equipment for other customers. Apple itself is largely dependent on China, since smartphones continue to determine half of the company’s revenue, and most of them are produced in China. Mexico produces an insignificant part of the components for Apple devices, but on a global scale, this site does not make a difference for Tim Cook’s company.
Chip deliveries for Apple devices from the Arizona-based TSMC plant are already being established, but technically they are still sent to Taiwan for testing and packaging. It will be more difficult to obtain any tariff policy preferences for foreign-assembled Apple devices from Trump in his second presidential term, since the president has made it clear that he is not ready to give concessions to individual companies this time. Trump’s negotiations with Apple management regarding the information security of this brand’s devices also remain difficult. The US President insists on providing intelligence agencies with the ability to access smartphones of this brand, but Apple management is trying to justify its refusal by protection from hacker attacks.