In recent years, the company has come under mounting consumer pressure regarding its reliance on low-cost labour in China, coupled with growing political restlessness in the US over its refusal to support national manufacturing.
The company will spend more than $100m on the US manufacturing initiative, CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, published on Thursday.
Cook did not say which Macintosh products will be produced in the US. But, as reported by Reuters, the effort is expected to go well beyond simple final assembly of devices, with Apple and unnamed partners building most or all of the components in the US as well.
“This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money,” Cook said.
He told NBC’s “Rock Center” program, in an interview to be aired later Thursday, that only one of the existing Mac product lines would be manufactured exclusively in the US.
Though Apple declined to comment beyond the interview, Cook has said in the past that he would like to see more of the company’s products assembled back home, but declining US manufacturing expertise made that difficult. Apple makes applications processors for the iPad and iPhone via Samsung Electronics in Austin, Texas, and sources glass for the same devices from a Corning facility in Kentucky.
“At the end of the day, Apple knows moving production to the US means lower profits for Apple,” a senior executive at Taiwan’s Quanta Computer, who declined to be named because of the companies’ business relationship, told Reuters.
“If Apple is really serious about moving production to the US, they would need to invest 10 times or even 100 times of that amount. We see only a minor impact on Apple suppliers.”
