Tim Cook had a chat with the folks over at Businessweek that covered many things such as the departure of Scott Forstall, the future of Apple TV and the disaster known as Maps. In addition, the Apple boss revealed the company’s plans for next year, which includes spending $100 million to bring some manufacturing jobs back to the good old United States of America.
One of the huge pieces to making this potential job boon come true is Foxconn’s expansion into North America. If you don’t happen to know, Foxconn is perhaps Apple’s biggest manufacturer of iPhones. Word of Foxconn’s expansion into the Unites States came from an interview with Bloomberg. In the interview, a Foxconn spokesman by the name of Louis Woo said the following “We are looking at doing more manufacturing in the US because, in general, customers want more to be done there.” So this suggest that some iPhone production in the states maybe in the immediate future (albeit, speculative).
Woo also mentioned some of Foxconn’s concerns with an US expansion saying “supply chain is one of the big challenges” the company will face. He also addressed the big elephant in the room, which is the issue of switching away from low-cost Chinese labor, saying “any manufacturing we take back to the U.S. needs to leverage high-value engineering talent there in comparison to the low-cost labor of China.” This is code for: expect prices for the iPhone to go up. I guess time will tell.