[1990C4S]

Originally Posted by jyl

That is a common and completely incorrect belief.

The great majority of the iPhone's economic value goes to the US.

Here is the iPhone 5's bill of materials.

Groundbreaking iPhone 5s Carries $199 BOM and Manufacturing Cost, IHS Teardown Reveals - IHS Technology

Of the $750 price of the phone, $550 is profit for Apple, that pays for its employees who are overwhelmingly in the US.

$200 goes to various makers of semiconductors and other components. Almost all of those are made in semiconductor fabs in Taiwan (TSMC etc) or Korea (Samsung etc) with package/ test done in various countries including China. Roughly half of those chips are sold by US semiconductor companies (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Cerus, etc) so their profit margin (60% or so) goes to pay for their mostly-US employees. The battery, case, and a few minor chips are from China.

$7 is the packaging and the accessories in the box (AC adapter, earbuds, cable). That comes from China.

Assembly is $8. That is done in China.

So basically, about 70-75% of an iPhone's value flows to the US, about 5-10% to China, the rest to Taiwan and Korea.

The iPhone is awesome for the US. We need more products like that, not fewer.

I've seen the assembly lines, and some sub-supplier assembly lines. All in China. The assembly jobs are gone. They used to call that the bread and butter work of America.

I believe Apple also minimizes US tax payments by increasing margins in other countries. That never used to happen.

Sure it's good, it's also far less good than it would have been 20 years ago.