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Donald Trump has hit out at Apple’s plans to produce more iPhones in India as a way of avoiding US tariffs on Chinese-made goods, as he continues to push the tech group to manufacture its best-selling device in America.
Speaking in Qatar on the latest leg of his Middle East tour, the US president said he had “a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday” after the Apple chief executive confirmed last week that Indian factories would supply the “majority” of iPhones sold in the US in the coming months.
The Financial Times previously reported that Apple planned to source from India all of the more than 60mn iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of next year.
Trump criticised that idea on Thursday, saying he told Cook: “We are treating you really good, we put up with all the plants you built in China for years. We are not interested in you building in India.”
He claimed that Apple would be “upping their production in the United States” following the conversation. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s comments are the latest sign of a cooling in the president’s relationship with Apple, one of America’s most valuable companies.
Speaking at an event in Riyadh this week after announcing a multibillion-dollar deal to sell hundreds of thousands of Nvidia processors to a new Saudi artificial intelligence project, Trump lavished praise on the chipmaker’s chief Jensen Huang from the stage, saying: “Tim Cook isn’t here but you are.”
Apple in February pledged to spend $500bn in the US during Trump’s four years in office, including producing chips and servers for AI.
But the company faces huge challenges in replicating its vast Chinese supply chain and production facilities in the US, which rely on a skilled high-tech manufacturing workforce that is now overwhelmingly concentrated in Asia.
Analysts estimate it would cost tens of billions of dollars and take years for Apple to increase iPhone manufacturing in the US, where it at present makes only a very limited number of products.
US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that Cook had told him the US would need “robotic arms” to replicate the “scale and precision” of iPhone manufacturing in China.
“He’s going to build it here,” Lutnick told CNBC. “And Americans are going to be the technicians who drive those factories. They’re not going to be the ones screwing it in.”
Lutnick added that his previous comments that an “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America” had been taken out of context.
“Americans are going to work in factories just like this on great, high-paying jobs,” he added.
For Narendra Modi’s government, the shift by some Apple suppliers into India is the highest-profile success of a drive to boost local manufacturing and attract companies seeking to diversify away from China.
Mobile phones are now one of India’s top exports, with the country selling more than $7bn worth of them to the US in the 2024-25 financial year, up from $4.7bn the previous year. The majority of these were iPhones, which Apple’s suppliers Foxconn and Tata Electronics make at plants in southern India’s Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states.
Modi and Trump are ideologically aligned and personally friendly, but India’s high tariffs are a point of friction and Washington has threatened to hit it with a 26 per cent tariff.
India and the US — its biggest trading partner — are negotiating a bilateral trade agreement, the first tranche of which they say they will be agreed by autumn.
“India’s one of the highest-tariff nations in the world, it’s very hard to sell into India,” Trump also said in Qatar on Thursday. “They’ve offered us a deal where basically they’re willing to literally charge us no tariff . . . they’re the highest and now they’re saying no tariff.”
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