At first glance, there is little to feel in the Apple business in the Brooklyner Trendviertel Williamsburg by Donald Trump’s customs books. It is Saturday after the announcement of the US President to impose import duties on products from most countries around the world, and in the shop there is no striking operation in this wet and cold afternoon than usual. So there does not seem to be a rush of customers who want to buy an iPhone or an iPad quickly. But the tariffs are definitely an issue. An employee says several visitors spoke to him this morning. A colleague tells of a customer whose mother – an economist – advised her to buy a new iPhone as soon as possible due to impending price increases. She also did that. Trump’s so -called “reciprocal” tariffs shaken the financial markets on a broad front. Apple, which is particularly hard affected by the world’s most valuable companies in the market capitalization. The group has almost all of its devices outside the United States, accordingly would be due for almost its entire product range tariffs in the future if Trump does not think differently. In the two days after Trump’s announcement, Apple’s share price fell by 16 percent and thus significantly more than the overall market. On Monday, the share was again in the minus in the first trades in the first trades. Apple’s stock market value, which was already more than 3.5 trillion dollars this year, fell under $ 2.8 trillion. Once of the devices in China, tariffs are particularly painful for the Apple CEO Tim Cook, because now his efforts to re-establish the production network threatens to run into the void. Apple still has the vast majority of its devices from order manufacturers in China, but Cook has tried to build production capacities in other Asian countries in recent years. He did this, not least because of the trade conflict between the USA and China, which prayed out in Trump’s first term. In India and Vietnam in particular, many Apple products are also built today. In India, for example, iPhones are manufactured, and Indian politicians said that the company wanted to have a quarter of its global iPhone production one day. In Vietnam, the group has devices such as the tablet computer iPad or the Apple Watch digital clock. Trump has now also imposed tariffs about these other countries, for Vietnam it is 46 percent and 26 percent for India. In China it is 34 percent, in addition to a custom of 20 percent. In Trump’s first term, Apple was faced with the risk of tariffs, but was ultimately largely spared. In the meantime, tariffs for the Apple Watch, for example, were withdrawn. Cook has cultivated a good relationship with Trump, and Trump described the Apple boss as a friend. At that time, Cook apparently obtained the argument that tariffs would help foreign competitors of Apple such as Samsung. At that time, the Apple boss also Half Trump to stage himself as president who creates jobs. In 2019 Trump visited a work in Austin Texan, in which the particularly expensive computer model Mac Pro was built, and afterwards he said he had “opened” it, although it has been in operation since 2013. Apple canceled investments in the USA Ancook also made all sorts of efforts to be mild during his second term. Just like some other CEO of American technology groups, he was a guest at Trump’s swearing in, and he donated a million dollars for a fund to be held. In February, Apple announced extensive investments in the United States. The group said he wanted to spend $ 500 billion in his home market within the next four years, he called this the greatest investment commitment in his history. Among other things, a new work should be created in Houston in Texas, in which servers are produced, i.e. large computers for data centers. They are to be used for Apple’s initiatives around artificial intelligence. Unsklar is to what extent all of this goes beyond that already planned investments. The group has made similar announcements in the past. A few months after the previous President Joe Biden took office, he announced that he wanted to invest $ 430 billion in the USA within five years, and in Trump’s first term in office, he promised to make $ 350 billion over a period of five years. In any case, Trump celebrated the recent announcement than his earnings. On his Truth Social platform, he wrote that Apple had “trust in what we do”, otherwise the group would “not invest ten cents”. This is exactly what the American Minister of Commerce Howard Lutnick prospect. He said in a television interview that in future iPhones were built in the United States, albeit in largely automated factories. Even if the company could be finished its iPhones in the United States, it would not automatically avoid tariffs, because many components in the devices also come from abroad. Tillers take over at the expense of profit margins themselves? Should the tariffs be no longer averted, Apple faces difficult decisions. The company has to consider to what extent the tariffs take care of the expense of its profit margins itself and to what extent the prices for the end consumers increase. According to estimates by the Morgan Stanley investment bank, the tariffs on products from China would increase Apple Apple’s annual costs by $ 8.5 billion. In the past quarters, he has repeatedly shown sales declines for the iPhone. Especially in China, which for Apple is not only as a manufacturing location, but also as a sales market of immense importance, the sales fell. The tariffs now make the starting position even more difficult. So far, Tim Cook has hardly publicly commented on the tariffs. When submitting the latest business results in January a few days after Trump’s swearing -in, he said to a question of an analyst: “We observe the situation and have nothing to add to it.” Analysts should expect more detailed statements from him if Apple publishes his next quarterly figures in a few weeks.
