Apple will have to pay a 25% or more tax for iPhones made outside the United States, President Trump said in a post on social media on Friday.
“I told Tim Cook of Apple a long time ago that I expect their iPhones that will be sold in the United States to be made in the United States, not India or anywhere else.” “If that’s not the case, Apple needs to pay the U.S. a tariff of at least 25%,” Trump said on Truth Social.
After the post came out on Friday, Apple stock dropped 3%.
Apple’s most popular phone is mostly made in China, but the company has been moving some production to India because that country has better trade relations with the U.S.
Some Wall Street experts think that if Apple moved production of the iPhone to the U.S., the price of the phone would go up by at least 25%. Dan Ives of Wedbush said that a U.S. iPhone would cost about $3,500. The price of the iPhone 16 Pro right now is around $1,000.
That same afternoon, Trump told reporters that the tax would also affect other phone makers, like Samsung, and that it would begin at the end of June.
It was agreed upon by Tim that he would not be doing this. He said he was building plants in India. I told them they could go to India, but they couldn’t sell to us without taxes. Trump said, “That’s the way it is.”
This is Trump’s latest attack on Apple. Over the past two weeks, he has put more pressure on the company and Cook to make more things in the United States. Politico says that Trump and Cook, who is the CEO of Apple, met at the White House on Tuesday.
There was no meeting at the White House, according to Fox News interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday. However, he did say that the Apple problem could be part of the Trump administration’s plan to bring “precision manufacturing” back to the U.S.
“A lot of Apple’s parts are made up of semiconductors.” So, Bessent said, “We’d like Apple to help us make the supply chain for semiconductors safer.”
Cook gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and went to the January inauguration. Apple has said it will spend $500 billion on research and development in the U.S. This includes making AI servers in Houston.
Apple wouldn’t say anything for this story.
During its earnings report on May 1, the company said that tariffs will add about $900 million to its costs this quarter. Cook said on the earnings call that it was “very difficult to predict” what would happen with tariffs after June.
The Financial Times reported Thursday that Foxconn, one of Apple’s main partners in making iPhones, is spending $1.5 billion to grow its facilities in India.
For his part in the trade war, Trump has publicly attacked other big U.S. companies, like Walmart. But the taxes on a certain consumer product are a new move. It’s not clear what the exact legal process for the tariff is.
Trump then wrote another post asking for a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union after the one he made about Apple. When looked at as a whole, the posts show that trade tensions are rising again after the U.S. temporarily lowered many of its tariffs, including those that were part of a deal with China.
Apple also had to deal with tariff threats during Trump’s first term, when a 15% tax on Chinese goods was being thought about for 2019. At that time, Cook and Trump were very close, and apple goods that were essential to the company were not affected by the trade deal.
Apple is in the sights of the U.S. president, and the company is also not doing well in China. The company raised the costs to trade in old iPhones in China on Friday.
