People may get tired of me calling everything hype this and hysteria that. Hell, I get tired of me doing that. But as a market manager I have got to use my B/S Detector as a primary tool because the markets move on emotion in the short-term, before whatever fundamentals are to emerge finally do so. So it follows that Apple (AAPL) would ask its China-based contract manufacturers to “start studying the possibility of moving iPhone production to the U.S.”.
Apple Supplier Foxconn Said to Evaluate Moving iPhone Production to U.S.
“Terry Gou, CEO of Foxconn, was said to be critical of moving the manufacturing operations for the iPhone. According to Nikkei, Gou believes that the cost of manufacturing iPhones in the U.S. will more than double.”
This is completely untenable and will not happen, at least without major fallout. The same Americans demanding jobs repatriation are going to make a new revolution when their gadgets double in price, which of course is not going to happen. The whole thing is a canard. In America, we do not do slave labor.
We can argue that the endless march of progress will see robotic factories assembling these items in the US, but the outsourced factories are already state of the art or scaling up to be. Automation is a constant, is global and it is already factored into the equation in manufacturing. But at some point in assembly and testing you need human labor, and lots of it. Re-shoring jobs in many cases is a political football and it will be interesting to see just how the Trump administration puts this Genie back in its bottle.
