A top White House economic advisor said President Donald Trump doesn’t want to hurt Apple (AAPL-0.39%) with its tariffs, only days after the president threatened the smartphone maker with steep import taxes on the iPhone.
White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said he believed many companies were exaggerating the impact of Trump’s tariffs on their bottom line.
“Everybody is trying to make it seem like it’s a catastrophe if there’s a tiny little tariff on them right now,” Hassett told CNBC (CMCSA+0.03%) on Tuesday. “In the end, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what the update is, but we don’t want to harm Apple.”
Hassett reiterated the White House’s position that Apple should move its factories and production facilities to the U.S. from China. “They need to move their stuff onshore as much as possible to make it so that the U.S. economy is secure and not prone to Chinese extortion,” Hassett said.
Trump had recently threatened to slap a 25% tariff on Apple to coerce the company into moving iPhone production to the United States. A tariff on the iPhone would likely cause consumers to bear at least part of the cost.
Experts have poured cold water on the assertion that shifting Apple’s supply chain to the U.S. would be easy to pull off without facing enormous hurdles. “Even with the 25% tariff, it still does not make sense to move production here, the cost would be significant and take several years,” Tahra Hoops, director of economic policy analysis at the center-left technology policy group Chamber for Progress, wrote on X.
Around 90% of the Apple iPhone is assembled in China. For its part, Apple is attempting to quickly shift its production capacity to India over the next few years with the goal of producing 25% of its iPhones there to avoid being obligated to pay steep import taxes.
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