Another thing Apple can do is use this moment as a golden opportunity to re-purchase its shares. It announced a $90-billion-share repurchase budget in January, and the state-mandated damage its stock is currently taking means it will be able to buy more shares for the same money — assuming it doesn’t use some of this capital to defer the impact of the tariffs (unlikely).
Why manufacturing won’t come back
What Apple won’t be able to do is move all of its manufacturing to the US. There are several reasons, but perhaps the most significant one is that there is nothing like enough trained staff for some of the most advanced manufacturing jobs available in the US. There’s been little investment in training up people for those jobs, and there is no way that training can be delivered before the tariffs strike later this week.
That means any manufacturer, including Apple, rushing to migrate more manufacturing to the US will choose to deploy automation and AI in their factories. Make no mistake, Apple and its manufacturers already make copious use of smart manufacturing systems, which means any manufacturing facilities they open in the US will be automated. Not only this, but there’s a matter of scale. There are physical, financial, and human limits to how many manufacturing lines can physically be built in any given time frame. As a result, building enough factories within a stone’s throw of the “Gulf of America” at the scale needed to meet US market demands is probably not going to happen.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
