Apple was on brink of crisis before Trump granted tariff concession

Apple has managed to dodge its biggest crisis since the pandemic – for the moment, at least. Donald Trump’s 125 per cent tariffs on goods produced in China threatened to upend Apple’s supply chain as seriously as the COVID snarls did five years ago. On Friday night (Saturday AEST), the US president handed Apple a major victory, exempting many popular consumer electronics .

That includes iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple Watches and AirTags. Apple and other tech firms have been given a major reprieve in the US trade war with China. Credit: AP Another win: the 10 per cent tariff on goods imported from other countries has been dropped for those products.



While a new, lower so-called sectoral tariff may still come on goods that have semiconductors – and a 20 per cent tariff on China remains – the change marks a win for Apple and a consumer electronics industry that still heavily relies on the Asian nation for manufacturing. “This is a major relief for Apple,” Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani said in a note on Saturday. “The tariffs would have driven material cost inflation.

” He expects the shares to rally on Monday following an 11 per cent rout this month. Loading Before the latest exemption, the iPhone maker had a plan: adjust its supply chain to make more US-bound iPhones in India, which would have been subject to far lower levies. That, Apple executives believed, would be a near-term solution to avoid the eye-watering China tariff and stave off hefty price hikes.

Given that the iPhone facilities in India are on pace to produce more than 30 million iPhones per year, manufacturing from that country alone could have fulfilled a fair chunk of American demand. Apple, these days, sells about 220 million to 230 million iPhones annually, with about one-third of those going to the US..