Why Apple Mac production is moving from China to us

Reuters

"This does not mean that Apple will do it themselves, but we work with people and we will invest our money," said Cook Bloomberg.

That suggests the company could help one of its partners Taiwanese production, running from factories in China, setting up production lines in the US dedicated to Apple products. Research firm IHS iSuppli noted that Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles iPhones, and Quanta Computer Inc., which is the same for MacBooks do, already small operations in the USA.

Apple representatives had no comment on Thursday than Cook's comments.

Like most consumer consumer electronics companies forge agreements with contract manufacturers to assemble its Apple products overseas. However, the meeting good for a fraction of the cost of making a PC or smartphone. Most of the cost is in buying chips, and many of which are made in the USA, Cook noted in his interview with NBC.

The company and Foxconn faced major criticism this year about working conditions at Chinese facilities where Apple products are assembled. The attention prompted Foxconn to raise salaries.

Cook said not which line of computers would be produced in the u.s. or when they would be manufactured in the country. But he told Bloomberg that the production more than just final Assembly would include. That suggests that processing of cases and print circuit boards could take place in the us.

The simplest Macs to assemble are the Mac Pro and Mac Mini desktop computers. Since they don't have the built-in screens of MacBooks and iMacs, they'd probably easier to separate the Asian display supply chain.

Analyst Jeffrey Wu on IHS iSuppli said it is not uncommon for PC makers to build their bulkier products close to their customers to cut back on delivery times and shipping costs.

Anyway, the American production line expected to represent only a small piece of Apple's total production, with a turnover of iPhones and iPads that are computers now dwarfism.

Apple is a trend that many jobs to go back to the US, could see Hal Sirkin, a partner with on latching said the Boston Consulting Group. He noted that Lenovo Group, the Chinese company that's neck-to-neck with Hewlett-Packard Co. for the title of the world's largest PC maker, announced in October that it will start making Pcs and tablets in the US

Chinese wages are increasing 15 to 20 percent per year, said Sirkin. U.S. wages rising much slower and the country is a cheap place to rent in comparison with other developed countries such as Germany, France and Japan, he said.

"A large number of industries, companies are rethinking their strategy of where manufacture takes place," Sirkin said.

Carl Howe, an analyst at the Yankee Group, compared Apples with Henry Ford's famous move of 1914 double pay its employees, decides to help to build a middle class that could afford to buy cars. But Cook's goal is probably more limited: to buy goodwill of the American consumer, Howe said.

"To say that the State of the Union is 2014. President Obama wants to talk about production. Who will he points you in the audience? Tim Cook, the man who brought production back from China. "And that scene is about and about playing again," said Howe. "And Yes, it is perhaps only (public relations), but it is a lot of high value PR."

Cook said in his interview with NBC that companies like Apple chose to produce their products in places like China, not because of the lower costs associated with it, but just because the production skills required are no longer available in the us.

He added that the consumer electronics world never really has had a large presence in the US production as a result, said that it's really more about the start of production in the us than to bring back, he.

But for nearly three decades Apple made his computers in the USA it began outsourcing production in the mid-1990s, first by selling some plants to manufacturers, then by hiring overseas manufacturers. The iMacs in Elk Grove, California, assembled to 2004.

Some Macs already say they are "mounted in the United States." That's because Apple has for years final assembly of some units performed in the us these machines are usually the result of special orders through the online store. The last step of the production can include the mounting of hard drives, memory chips and graphics cards in the computer cases that are manufactured elsewhere. With Cook's announcement Thursday, the company included go much further in the amount of work in the u.s.

The news comes a day after its worst decline in Apple stock in four years posted $ 35 billion market capitalization, erase. Apple's stock rose $ 8,45 or 1.6 percent, to close at $ 547.24 on Thursday.

AP

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