Apple CEO Tim Cook’s old video resurfaces explaining why companies manufacture in China amid trade war

Amid the rising global discussions on shifting manufacturing away from China, Apple CEO Tim Cook’s old video resurfaced on video highlighting why the tech giant has remained committed to the production network of the country.

In the viral clip, which has been widely shared on social media, Cook debunks the popular myth that companies manufacture in China due to cheap labour costs. He explains advantages in China are actually its vast and deeply developed industrial ecosystem.

“There is confusion about China. And let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labour costs. I am not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being a low labour cost country many years ago,” Cook says in the video.

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The Apple CEO then praises the country’s tooling expertise and skilled labour, which makes it vital for the precision manufacturing that are required by Apple products.

“The reason is because of the skill, the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is. It is like the products we do require really advanced tooling and the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with materials that we do are state-of-the-art,” he adds.

He compares the expertise between China and the US in a light-hearted manner, saying, “If you look at the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill a room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”

Social media reacts

The video gained a wave of response, with most social media users agreeing with Cook.

Another agreed with Cook, “True, it’s about scale, speed, and precision. China has a massive pool of highly skilled tooling and manufacturing engineers. It’s not just labor, it’s a full ecosystem built over decades, with deep supply chains and rapid turnaround that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.”

“Any manufacturing job requires tremendous discipline. About 20 years back, I interned with a global tyre manufacturer. The level of precision, physical rigour and discipline needed to do that job was simply crazy,” said one user.

“Totally agree with Tim. Companies exploited China's cheap labour earlier, but it was China's rapid development of manufacturing tech that took it so ahead of the US and Germany's of the world,” a person said.

A user noted, “This is true. I spoke to my chinease colleagues , employee cost is very high there and at par with advanced nations.”

Trade war

The video resurfaced amid the rising trade tensions between the United States and China. US President has imposed 145 per cent tariffs on Chinese imports, to which China retaliated with tariffs of up to 125 per cent on American goods.

Meanwhile, Trump introduced a 10 per cent duty on imports from all other nations, but paused them for several countries for 90 days.

(With inputs from agencies)