Apple Moves to Reduce Reliance on China for US iPhones

Bloomberg

15 hours ago

Live on Bloomberg TV
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00:00What was so interesting is this brought the ire of President Trump. He was frustrated that Apple was doing more of its manufacturing in India, shifting from China. He wanted it in the US. But has Tim Cook done enough therefore in the United States to offset this? I think Tim Cook eventually will do enough in the United States to offset it. But today the answer to that is now, and it's not unexpected that they move this to India. They've been working with India since roughly 2017. So it takes a long time to build manufacturing. So you just don't go in no matter who you are, president or not, and say you're going to build tomorrow. It takes time to build chapters, takes time. So how much do you think ultimately will be sourced from India into the United States? Is it only going to be iPhones and other accessories? Well, I think we're starting to see other plants come online in the US, for example, in Houston. When we look at what they want to do with Apple intelligence and servers for that, they are building that and that's coming online in 2026. So that's an example of some of the products that will be built here. But the iPhone manufacturing, I expect that it will take several years to get it up and running. Any major significant U.S. presence and this is part of the reason why there is roughly $600 billion earmarked towards creating manufacturing in the US, and that comes in many different forms. Part of that will be for servers, but you have to envision that part of that will also be for iPhones. Let's talk about what's happening here in the United States, because today we understand that Apple is unfolding its academy. This is all about training here in the United States. Who exactly is it for and what production could that ultimately lead to here? So one of the things that we have happening right now is AI is very complicated and businesses actually don't know where to get started. So the concept behind the Apple Academy is for small, medium businesses to understand effectively what they need to know to build next generation manufacturing, which would be highly hybrid. And that is going to be a multi-day program that small and medium businesses sign up for. They currently have a waitlist at this point. For the next wave of that, they will be running those courses throughout the year. And then once you've gone through the course, there's an opportunity to discuss more detailed discussions about what kind of products and services they need with Apple engineers that can help you to do something that's more specific to your organization. This is to fill a skills gap. You know, we have plenty of education programs in high school and above to try to bring in new employees. But if you're actually a business running today, especially a small medium business, there's very few options for you. So this is both an opportunity to educate small businesses and also put them in the pipeline to buy Apple products and services moving forward. Really interesting you talk about this is the skills gap. Prior to this, of course, President Trump has talked a lot about the production gap and where he wants to see that rectified. Just take a listen to what he said on August the sixth. We're doing these things now in the United States instead of other countries, faraway countries. This is a significant step toward the ultimate goal of ensuring that iPhones sold in the United States of America also are made in America with a mass infusion of capital that's announcing today. Apple will also build a 250,000 square foot server manufacturing facility in Houston and invest billions of dollars to construct data centers across the country from North Carolina to Iowa to Oregon. Marvel, you so thoughtfully put us right on the medium sized businesses that really have nowhere to go when it comes to upskilling and being able to facilitate production. What is it that Apple brings by training? Because really the anxiety for Tim Cook has been they haven't got the tooling engineers in the United States that they have in China, that they have in India. Is that what is going after longer term? I think yes is the short answer, but it's actually a very broad field when you think about what we're moving into, moving forward. There's been a lot of discussion of physical robotics and a lot of that will be in manufacturing. It could be for iPhones, it could be for automotive. The reason that they picked Detroit is not lost. It's a manufacturing culture. There are companies there, but we are running into this gap where these organizations don't have data scientists. They don't understand machine learning as an example. So we're starting with things that is, you know, on the inside machine learning, which is a basic way to start and then moving forward. So these are short courses. The Apple engineers that are there are actually basically doing rotations to spend some time helping with small medium businesses, but they're also still doing their day job. So there wasn't a net new investment in terms of employees, but there is that new investment in terms of getting organizations to understand what is required for them to participate in the next generation economy. That's stage one. Well, alongside that stage is what companies are listening to in terms of what's needed in terms of manufacturing here in the US on the most sophisticated chips. I turn our attention to what's happening with Intel at the moment. I mean, we just heard from President Trump on this, the sixth, what he wants of Apple. How do you make of the state that they might take an intel? I think we really were in the situation where the concept of a US chip manufacturer was almost going to go away. There was just so many discussions about what would happen to Intel, and I think the US government saying we're going to step in, we're going to take an equity stake, some of that chips back money that we had talked about in the Biden administration that was actually going to go away. It's actually now come back and the context of how that comes back, if you look at it as an investment and equity stake, it is really to try to create confidence in Intel as a long standing player to take away that risk. Buyers do not want to invest in a chip company where they think there to be risk. These are multiyear deals that we're talking about, plans that I talk to you today about, something I want to have come online in three years, but I don't think you're going to be there in three years. I'm not calling it. And so part of this strategy is to take away some of that risk, to give Intel a foundation where they think they can execute on the strategy that they need to execute on without it all being at the whim of. How does the market feel about you?