Apple lost the title of the most valuable company on the stock market, as investors fear the consequences of the duties imposed by the president for the iPhone company Donald Trump on China. Apple's shares have lost over a 5th of their value in fresh days. Microsoft was ranked number 1 on the Olympus stock marketplace on Tuesday with a marketplace value of about $2.64 trillion (EUR 2.4 trillion). Apple remained behind with a score of just under $2.6 trillion.
Most iPhones are produced in China. If we sum up all the duties imposed by the Trump administration, imports from the People's Republic of China to USA will be subject to duties of 104 percent from Wednesday. Apple now wants to initially deliver iPhones with India to the USA, while the CEO Tim Cook (64) Trying to get a tariff exemption, wrote the Wall Street Journal. As indicated, citing well-informed sources, the situation is inactive besides vague to change long-term investments in supply chains. Trump imposed a 27% work on goods from India.
“Why not build in the US?”
Meanwhile, the message from the White home is clear: Apple could simply produce iPhones in the US for the American market. "Why are they building all this in China? Why don’t they do it here?” Secretary of Commerce Trump Howard Lutnick (63) he asked a fewer weeks ago.
In consequence to the allegation that China's workforce is cheaper, Lutnick replied, “There are now robots that can do it.” In the US, it will make “millions and millions” of jobs, for example for construction workers and mechanics who will preserve robots. Finally, Lutnick enthusiastically stated: “The army of millions and millions of people screwing on tiny screws to produce iPhones – this is what comes to America.
iPhone from the USA – for $3,500?
Industry experts who know Apple's supply chains rapidly deal with specified speculation. Analogue Dan Ives Wedbush's investment firm warns that if Apple produced its iPhones at a mill in West Virginia or fresh Jersey, the price of the device would be $3,500. Ives estimated in CNN that if the company had moved only 10 percent of its supply chain to the US, it would have cost her 3 years and $30 billion.
The marketplace expert stressed that no another company suffered so badly due to Trump's duties. "This could change Apple's future". Needham analyst, Laura Martin, said in an interview with CNBC that Apple needed about 3 years to decision 14 percent of iPhone production to India. Martin besides assumes that the company will effort to keep prices unchanged for US final customers.
20 years of investment in China
According to the marketplace expert Craig Moffett with Moffett Nathanson, Apple “did not respond well” to the duties. The company has invested 15–20 years in the construction of current supply chains – "and simply cannot be repeated anywhere else." It is not about pouring cement under a mill in the United States and ordering robots, as the labour marketplace itself in the USA does not supply the essential skills and number of employees, Moffett argued in CNBC.
