Trump Wants iPhones Made in the USA, But Is It Even Possible?

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Transcript:

[00:00:04] Doug McIntyre: Lee Donald Trump still thinks that, we can build iPhones in the United States. Now. It’s funny. He just basically publicly, shamed Cook who did, production from China.

[00:00:20] Doug McIntyre: To India. Yeah. maybe he’s closer friends with the Chinese than I know. Listen, if he were upset and said, I want you to move them from China to the United States. I get it, but I, anyway, it’s too complicated for me to understand

[00:00:36] Lee Jackson: Well, the logistics. Well, and plus it’s, you know what it is.

[00:00:41] Lee Jackson: I mean, it’s the 800 pound elephant in the room. It’s like the, the assembly costs are just so much lower, I mean, to assemble a iPhone and Cupertino, in California you, I don’t even know what the hourly cost would be for people to do that, but it’s certainly a lot more than it would be in, India or, or in Oh, right.

[00:01:08] Lee Jackson: Indonesia.

[00:01:08] Doug McIntyre: It takes you back to what the $3,000 iPhone or the $700 Nike’s mean, The conversation about making these things in the United States has been very simple. You, if you build Nike’s here, you can’t sell ’em for 200, you’ve gotta sell ’em for 700 because of the cost of labor, right?

[00:01:28] Doug McIntyre: iPhone, you’ve got it. Double the price or something. The one thing that no one has been able to say is no one has come up with something you can build. The United States at a similar price, and I believe that because of the cost of labor, that is impossible. I don’t. I can’t think of anything you can make in the United States for less money than you can make it in places with just lower costs of labor, but skilled, skilled workers,

[00:01:57] Lee Jackson: Well, not unless you have a totally robotic assembly facility where you just have some guy going, boom, start the assembly line, build the iPhones.

[00:02:07] Lee Jackson: But yeah, I don’t know how they could quickly ever implement that here.

[00:02:12] Doug McIntyre: And well, look, the other problem you have is CapEx. If I wanna build a factory that can make, where I can make Nike’s or assemble iPhones, I’m looking at, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to build those facilities.

[00:02:30] Doug McIntyre: It’s gonna take me two to three years to build them. Easy, easy. I’m now out towards the end of this decade and I’m still trying to get the economies of scale of a more expensive workforce.

[00:02:42] Lee Jackson: Yeah, yeah. I know what he gonna do, and. While I understand the president’s angst over it, it is just not a quick fix, That’s their leading product. It’s not like they have a lot of other products. You’ve mentioned on numerous occasion max sales have fallen off people like the iPads and all that, but it’s the Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) pad that the NFL uses. Yeah, I think it’s called. I don’t think there that there’ll be any short, answer to the President’s, fury with Tim Cook.

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