New Delhi: Immediately after assuming office, US President Donald Trump announced and implemented strict measures and laws, the most prominent being the foreign policy and tariff wars. President Trump also said that he wanted American companies to manufacture their products in America. One of these companies is iPhone maker Apple. However, market experts, observers, reviewers, and industry leaders have highlighted that large-scale manufacturing of products is not feasible in the USA. Amid this, a 2024 video of Apple CEO Tim Cook is going viral on social media in which he explains why Apple chose to make their products in China.
Tim Cook is seen in the video saying that China wasn’t their first choice because of their low labour costs. “The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs. I’m not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country years ago,” he says in the video.
He explained that China is the manufacturing hub of several top tech companies because of their quantity of skill. “The products we require need advanced tooling and the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with materials that we do are state-of-the-art,” he said, adding that the ‘tooling skill’ in China is ‘very deep’.
Highlighting the difference in manufacturing in the US and China, Cook said, “In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not we could fill the room. In China, however, you could fill multiple football fields. Hence, the vocational expertise in China is very deep”.
Earlier this week, Trump said that he wants Apple to start manufacturing its products in the USA. “If Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters referring to the company’s promise to invest $500 billion domestically over the next four years.
However, a Bloomberg report says that Apple is unlikely to move iPhone production to the US in the foreseeable future for a variety of reasons, including the shortage of facilities and labour needed to produce the devices. The country also lacks the rich ecosystem of suppliers, manufacturing and engineering know-how that, for now, can only be found in Asia.
Credit: www.india.com
