Following a strong second fiscal quarter in 2017 in which its revenues hit nearly $53 billion, Apple is taking on a mission to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US with the creation of a billion-dollar fund that aims to do just that.
To be clear, that’s just the initial amount that Apple is injecting into the effort. The company will announce the first investment from this fund later in May.
Speaking to CNBC’s Jim Cramer, CEO Tim Cook said:
By doing that, we can be the ripple in the pond. Because if we can create many manufacturing jobs around, those manufacturing jobs create more jobs around them because you have a service industry that builds up around them.
That’s an interesting move for the iPhone maker, which presently manufactures its hottest-selling mobile device in China through partner firms like Foxconn.
Cook noted that Apple presently has 80,000 people working in the US alone, of which about 25,000 are employed in the company’s research and development wings. He also said that Apple spent $50 billion last year in the US, buying parts from suppliers who manufacture locally, including Corning and 3M.
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It’ll be interesting to follow Apple’s effort to bring jobs stateside, and see what that spells for the prices of its products in the coming months. Given higher costs of labor in the country than in Asia, I’m not counting on iPhones and MacBooks getting any cheaper.
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