Apple to invest $100 million-plus in U.S. production

Friday, December 7, 2012

— Apple Inc. plans to spend more than $100 million next year on building Macintosh computers in the U.S., shifting a small portion of manufacturing away from China, the country that has handled assembly of its products for years.

“Next year we’re going to bring some production to the U.S.,” Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money.”

Apple, which until the late 1990s made and assembled many products in the U.S., moved manufacturing to Asia to take advantage of the region’s lower labor costs. The planned investment will use a small slice of Apple’s $121.3 billion in cash, and probably won’t meaningfully affect profit margins. Still, it reflects pressure on companies to create even a modest number of domestic jobs as the unemployment rate hovers near 8 percent and the economy rebounds from the recession that ended in 2009.

“I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job,” Cook said. “But I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs.”

Cook discussed the investment plans in an interview that touched on his relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the recent dismissal of senior executives and the company’s competition with Samsung Electronics Co.

While Cook didn’t outline where the manufacturing would happen or how much would be produced in the U.S., he said the company will work with partners and that the operations would include more than just final assembly.

Apple’s shares rose $8.45, or 1.6 percent, to close Thursday at $547.24. The stock fell the most in almost four years Wednesday on concern that the company will lose ground in smart phones to Nokia Oyj in China while giving up market share to Google Inc. in tablets. China Mobile Ltd., China’s largest wireless carrier, agreed to carry the Lumia 920T, a device based on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone 8 software, and said it must further discuss with Apple before a deal can be reached on offering the iPhone. Meanwhile research firm IDC said Wednesday that Apple’s share of the tablet market will slip to 53.8 percent this year from 56.3 percent in 2011, while Google’s will increase.

Many of the parts that go into the iPhone and iPad already are made in the U.S. This includes the display glass, which is made in Kentucky, Cook said.

Apple also has created jobs in the mobile-software industry through the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, which fueled an explosion in creation of applications, he said.

Besides building a new headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is working on a campus in Austin, Texas, Cook said. The company is building new data centers in Nevada and Oregon, while expanding an existing one in Maiden, N.C., he said.

Before shifting work abroad, Apple had handled manufacturing in such locations as Elk Grove, Calif., near Sacramento, and Fountain, Colo., near Colorado Springs.

Mac desktop and laptop computers — once Apple’s cornerstone — have been dwarfed by the iPhone and iPad more recently. With sales of $23.2 billion on 18.2 million units last year, Mac computers accounted for just 15 percent of total revenue.

Apple and its manufacturing partner Foxconn Technology Group have faced criticism from labor- and worker-rights groups for the conditions at facilities where Apple products are made. Cook defended Apple’s practices, including enlisting the Fair Labor Association to audit Foxconn’s factories.

“We’re doing a number of things that I think are really great, really different, and industry-leading,” Cook said. “No one is looking at this as deeply as we are or going as deep in the supply chain.”

Taiwan-based Foxconn itself has operations in the U.S. The company, which has 1.5 million of its global 1.6 million workers in China, runs facilities in California as well as Houston, said Louis Woo, a spokesman. U.S. factories mostly make servers while larger operations in Mexico assemble consumer electronics such as TVs, he said. Woo declined to comment on Apple’s plans or specific clients and was unable to immediately say how many employees Foxconn has in the U.S. Its 100,000 non-China workers are in 17 countries including Brazil, Mexico, Czech Republic, Vietnam and Taiwan.

Information for this article was contributed by Peter Burrows, Tom Giles and Tim Culpan of Bloomberg News.

Business, Pages 27 on 12/07/2012