Trump threatens Apple with a 25% tariff on its iPhones if it doesn’t manufacture in the US

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened this Friday to the tech giant Apple with a 25% tariff on its products if the company does not relocate operations and starts manufacturing them on U.S. soil.

“I informed (Apple CEO) Tim Cook long ago that I expect iPhones to be made and assembled in the United States, not in India or any other place,” Trump wrote today on his social media platform Truth Social.

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“If not, Apple will have to pay a tariff of at least 25% to the U.S.,” adds the brief text published by the president.

The message from the U.S. president has had an immediate effect on the share price of the company based in Cupertino, California, with drops of more than 3% of its shares in electronic trading prior to the opening of the stock exchange in New York.

Apple announced in February, just over a month after Trump returned to power, an investment of 500 billion dollars over the next four years to establish server or silicon product manufacturing in order to please the New Yorker, embroiled in a global trade war to get large companies in strategic sectors to return their operations to the United States.

Since then Trump had praised that commitment from Apple on repeated occasions.

The popular products of the tech giant, which has its main market in the U.S. thanks mainly to the sale of phones, have taken center stage in recent months due to the possibility that Trump will apply a tariff that would reduce their sales and could prove very unpopular among Americans.

Apple reported in early May that if the tariffs driven by Trump remain at the current level, the company will suffer an impact of about $900 million in costs for the company next quarter.

Trump’s intimidating message against Apple comes on the same day that the US president has threatened the European Union with imposing a direct tariff of 50% on all its products from June, assuring that the talks with Brussels “are not going anywhere”