For decades, American tech companies have built and assembled their devices in emerging markets while concentrating their domestic efforts on product design and software development — because, according to CNN , the profit margins are much higher than for knocking together phones and computers in factories.
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President Donald Trump aims to disrupt that dynamic with tariffs that turn cheap foreign goods into expensive imports to spur domestic manufacturing — including the tech gadgets that define our modern lives.
But it costs much more to make tech products in the U.S. than in places like China, Mexico and even Canada. Here’s what you need to know .
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Labor: The Cost of Human Capital in Manufacturing
Many factors contribute to the high cost of making tech products in America compared to lower-cost manufacturing countries — but none is more consequential than the cost of labor .
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The Many Other Variables of Global Tech Production
Labor is the biggest factor, but not the only one by a long shot. It’s challenging to say definitively what tech products would cost if they were made in one country or another because of variables like:
So, What’s the Cost of Outsourced Tech Compared To That Made in the USA?
The decades-long trend of outsourcing American tech manufacturing has been so near-total that there’s very little U.S. tech production left to compare to places like China.
One of the last exhaustive analyses came from PCMag in 2023, which found that the tiny remaining number of domestic tech manufacturers dealt mostly in high-end, high-quality, high-performance and high-cost consumer electronics, audio equipment, PCs and e-bikes designed for ultra-luxury consumers — and even most of those contain many foreign components.
Therefore, the only real comparison can be hypothetical, so why not hypothesize using the most familiar and iconic American-designed, Chinese-built gadget in the world, the iPhone?
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com : Here’s How Much Tech Products Made in the US Cost Compared To Mexico, Canada and China
