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President Donald Trump has threatened Apple with a 25 per cent tariff on iPhones unless the company shifts production of its best-selling product to the US, escalating a stand-off with chief executive Tim Cook.
Cook said this month that Indian factories would supply the “majority” of iPhones sold in the US in the coming months, as Apple tries to avoid the tariffs on Chinese-made goods imposed by Trump as part of his trade war.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday.
“If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.”
Apple sells more than 60mn iPhones in the US a year. The Financial Times previously reported that the company planned to source all of those devices from India by the end of next year.
Foxconn, a key Apple supplier, is investing $1.5bn to expand iPhone production in India with a display module facility near Chennai, the FT reported earlier on Friday.
Apple shares fell 3 per cent in pre-market trading following Trump’s post. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company’s stock lost more than $300bn in a single day last month, after Trump threatened huge new tariffs on dozens of countries, including all of Apple’s biggest manufacturing hubs around the world.
The US subsequently granted an exemption from many of those tariffs for smartphones and other electronics, and earlier this month Trump agreed to temporarily reduce levies on imports from China.
Trump’s latest threat comes a week after he complained about “a little problem with Tim Cook” over Apple’s plans to expand iPhone manufacturing in India. He claimed at the time that Apple would be “upping their production in the United States” following a discussion with the big tech company’s boss.
“We are treating you really good, we put up with all the plants you built in China for years,” Trump said during a visit to Qatar during a Middle East tour. “We are not interested in you building in India.”
Cook has been in regular contact with Trump and his administration since attending the president’s inauguration in January. Apple has pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the US over the next four years, including by buying chips and artificial intelligence servers made in America. But the challenges of replicating its Asian supply chain and production facilities for a product as complex as the iPhone in the US are significant.
Before Trump put his China tariffs on hold, Apple had said it expected to face hundreds of millions of dollars in extra costs due to the new duties, warning that the ultimate impact was hard to predict.
“What we learned some time ago was that having everything in one location had too much risk with it, and so we have over time, with certain parts of the supply chain . . . opened up new sources of supply,” Cook told analysts earlier this month.
