YOGYAKARTA - Apple's company has been assembling its products outside the United States. Specifically for iPhone phones, 85-90 percent of its production uses facilities in China. Why does Apple produce iPhones in China, not in their home country?
Apple is working with a number of major manufacturing partners, mostly in Taiwan, such as Foxconn, Wistron, Pegatron, and Compal Electronics. These vendors have a number of assembly facilities mostly available in China. For example, Foxconn, has Apple product assembly facilities in Zhengzhou and Shenzen cities.
The assembly facility employs hundreds of thousands of employees who are able to produce millions of devices in a short time. Not massively producing, the quality is superior to other countries. So why does Apple produce iPhones in China to date?
Apple has been assembling its products outside the United States since Steve Jobs' tenure. This happens because Jobs himself is not sure if the iPhone and other Apple products are assembled domestically.
Some experts, including Jobs and Tim Cook as his successors, think that the United States does not have adequate human resources like those of other countries where Apple produces its devices.
In Steve Jobs' biography written by Walter Isaacson, Jobs revealed that the US lacked about 30,000 skilled technicians needed to support the production process. Meanwhile, in China, Apple could rely on up to 700,000 skilled workers at the factory at the time.
"You can't find that much in America to work on," Jobs said in the book, quoted by The Verge, Friday (11/4/2025).
Tim Cook, who replaced Steve Jobs as CEO of Apple, also revealed the same reason for the Fortune Magazine Global Forum in 2017. He dismissed the notion that Apple chose China as its production site due to low labor costs.
"China is no longer a country that provides low wages, since a few years ago. And that (cheap wages) is not the reason we chose China as a supply chain," Cook said.
"The reason is because of the skill and quantity (of labor) in one location, and the type of skills," added Cook.
Cook explained that China has extraordinary advantages in the manufacturing sector, particularly in the preparation of tools, assembly techniques, and high-level material processing of all the essential elements in the iPhone manufacturing process. He also emphasized that in the United States, even finding tooling engineers is quite difficult.
"In the US, we may only be able to fill a small room with tools engineers. In China? Can you fill some football fields," he said.
The statement indicates that Apple's dependence on China is not solely driven by economic reasons. But because the country has a very developed manufacturing ecosystem, something other countries cannot yet control, including the United States.
Because the majority of the iPhone assembly process and other Apple products were carried out in China, Donald Trump urged Apple to move its production facilities back to the United States. He believes that the company is capable of producing its devices in its own homeland.
This statement was made by White House Spokesman, Krypto Leavitt, who said Trump believes America has sufficient manpower, resources, and capacity to support domestic iPhone production.
"He (President Trump) believes that we (America) have the manpower and resources to do that," Leavitt said at a press conference.
Trump's desire arose amid the heated war of tariffs between the United States and China. Recently, Trump announced an increase in the import rate of goods from China to 125 percent. He also applied similar tariffs to more than 70 other trading partner countries, such as India, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
However, Trump has postponed the application of tariffs for 90 days. During this grace period, the tariff was reduced by 10 percent to provide space for these countries to negotiate. However, this leniency does not apply to China.
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Due to the high import rate from China, Apple is in a difficult position because it has to bear the surge in production costs. Trump emphasized that if companies like Apple don't want to be subject to tariff burdens, then they should move their production process to the United States.
That's a review of why Apple produces iPhones in China, not in the United States. The reason is that the manufacturing industry in China is able to assemble products more massively and produce superior quality. Also read Apple expands iPhone production to India.
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