The last big round of global innovation was internet services, of which I'm pretty sure (not having looked it up) that US exports represent the majority of world exports.

Apple keeps half the sales price of every iPhone whereas the last I saw Foxconn gets only a few dollars per phone for the final assembly. It used to be that most of the expensive components (display, memory) in the iPhone were supplied by Japan, S Korea and Taiwan, but I admit that that might have changed over the years.

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Buttons840 a day ago | parent | next [-]

It looks like cell phone exports are about 30 billion dollars, which is 1% of the 3 trillion dollars mentioned earlier. I'm surprised it's so low. (I'm open to corrections on these numbers.)

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hollerith a day ago | parent [-]

Here's my estimate, taken mostly from figures from Apple's 2024 annual report (as reported by Gemini Flash).

Apple's total worldwide revenue for fiscal year 2024 was $391.035 billion. The Americas Segment (which includes the US) represented $167.05 billion of that, leaving $224 billion for the rest of the world.

Apple reports that their cost of goods sold was $210.352 billion, leaving 180.68 billion as so-called "gross profit". The majority of this gross profit will be used to pay salaries and other expenses (e.g., office space) of having employees, most of which goes to Americans. (Most of the rest will be "retained earnings", which means it either goes back to investors or is used to try to generate new streams of revenue.)

But only some of that gross profit will come from exports. Let's assume that exports are as profitable (per unit of revenue) as US sales are, which seems reasonable to me because competition (mostly from Android) would be the main thing keeping gross profit low, and Android is a major competitive force in the US market, so estimated gross profit derived from sales to the rest of the world would be 180.68 * (224 / 391.035) == $103.5 billion. That is revenue from all products and services, and Apple reports that revenue from the iPhone is 0.5145 of all revenue (worldwide) or about $53 billion per year flowing from the rest of the world to Apple (and to governments in the US in the form of taxes).

To be clear, that's assuming that zero of the hardware (more precisely, zero of what accountants call the "variable cost") that goes into an iPhone is bought from US suppliers (which seems a reasonable assumption to me).

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Buttons840 a day ago | parent [-]

Your argument is that Apple exports are 3% of exports then? Did I understand correctly?

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hollerith a day ago | parent | next [-]

"Exports" is hiding a lot of complexity here. Some export statistics might add the entire price of an iPhone to the export figure for China because that is where the final assembly is done even though (like my previous comment shows) about half of the money from that sale ends up in the hands of Apple's investors, US-based employees of Apple and such US-based suppliers as the companies that built Apple's headquarters and the companies that supply Apple's offices and data centers with electricity.

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Buttons840 21 hours ago | parent [-]

If we go away back the argument was that the US has no real exports. You've been arguing that phones are an export, but you admit those are built by other countries. It seems fair that the country that makes a phone and then exports it would be given credit for that in the statistics.

I'm not sure what the point of this thread is anymore, so I'll stop here.

	▲	hollerith 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So it is immaterial to you that Foxconn gets about $5 per iPhone sold and Apple get about $500?

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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garte a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's about the "next big thing" not what happened 20 years ago.

	▲	hollerith a day ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but how are you and I supposed to know which country will win the export market for the next big thing? We could guess, but there's been a lot of guesses (confidently made out to be facts and inevitabilities) made in this thread so far. I'm trying to ground the discussion in actual facts.