Sunday, September 23, 2018

The Apple iPhone is really created in many countries with much of the value coming from the U.S.

See Bringing iPhone Assembly to U.S. Would Be a Hollow Victory for Trump: The president’s tariffs on Chinese imports could hurt Apple without addressing the real challenge of China by Greg Ip of The WSJ. Excerpt:
"Apple’s iPhone is one of the most successful consumer products in history, and one of the most globalized. The iPhone 7’s camera is Japanese, its memory chips South Korean, its power management chip British, its wireless circuits Taiwanese, its user-interface processor Dutch and the radio-frequency transceiver American, according to a study of the value added in smartphones by Jason Dedrick of Syracuse University and Kenneth Kraemer of the University of California at Irvine.
The factory workers who assemble iPhones in China contribute just 1% of the finished product’s value. Apple’s shareholders and employees, who are predominantly American, capture 42%.

Suppose Apple decided that all the phones it sells in the U.S. would be assembled here. Mr. Dedrick estimates each phone requires two hours of assembly. For 60 million phones, that means 120 million hours of work, or roughly 60,000 jobs.

Hiring that many workers is no picnic: In 2013 Motorola Mobility set out to make its Moto X phone in the U.S. but struggled to find enough American workers according to Willy Shih, an expert in manufacturing at Harvard Business School who is also a director of Flex Inc., the contract manufacturer that Motorola used. In 2014 Motorola decided to outsource production. Apple has encountered similar problems assembling its Mac Pro computer in Texas.

Assuming Apple could find 60,000 workers, it would have to hire many away from other employers given how low unemployment currently is. The benefit of the wages they earn would be offset by the higher prices other Americans pay for their phones.

How much would that add to the price of a phone? Mr. Dedrick says about $30; Mr. Shih thinks it would be more because of the cost of shipping individual components to the U.S. Still, such an increase would hardly kill sales of iPhones, now priced at $449 to $1,099. The bigger cost of U.S. assembly, says Mr. Dedrick, would be the inability to quickly add hundreds of thousands of workers when new phones are launched, which is only possible in Asia. Apple can charge premium prices in part because it introduces superior features before its competitors do."

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