Analysts estimate it would cost tens of billions of dollars and take years for Apple to increase iPhone manufacturing in the US, where it at present makes only a very limited number of products.
US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that Cook had told him the US would need “robotic arms” to replicate the “scale and precision” of iPhone manufacturing in China.
“He’s going to build it here,” Lutnick told CNBC. “And Americans are going to be the technicians who drive those factories. They’re not going to be the ones screwing it in.”
Lutnick added that his previous comments that an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America” had been taken out of context.
“Americans are going to work in factories just like this on great, high-paying jobs,” he added.
For Narendra Modi’s government, the shift by some Apple suppliers into India is the highest-profile success of a drive to boost local manufacturing and attract companies seeking to diversify away from China.
Mobile phones are now one of India’s top exports, with the country selling more than $7 billion worth of them to the US in the 2024-25 financial year, up from $4.7 billion the previous year. The majority of these were iPhones, which Apple’s suppliers Foxconn and Tata Electronics make at plants in southern India’s Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states.
Modi and Trump are ideologically aligned and personally friendly, but India’s high tariffs are a point of friction and Washington has threatened to hit it with a 26 percent tariff.
India and the US—its biggest trading partner—are negotiating a bilateral trade agreement, the first tranche of which they say they will be agreed by autumn.
“India’s one of the highest-tariff nations in the world, it’s very hard to sell into India,” Trump also said in Qatar on Thursday. “They’ve offered us a deal where basically they’re willing to literally charge us no tariff… they’re the highest and now they’re saying no tariff.”
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