India has a long, very long, extremely long way to go before it is ready to compete on an even playing field. Its power grid is unreliable, not exactly an asset when planning to build factories.
The bureaucratic hurdles and regulatory complexities are legendary, and the “2nd tier” workers are in short supply. India still exists in castes, and while there is a well educated upper tier, these kinds of factories require thousands of well-trained workers which India lacks. (Could it happen? Sure. But that takes time, just as building out an infrastructure, finding the capital for factories, and (especially) growing a vibrant sub-sector of suppliers would take. That could be years in the making, and the tariffs are NOW. Oops, not now, oh wait, they’re NOW again. But not for these exceptions, except oops, NOW again.
In this atmosphere don’t expect ramrod, straight ahead progress. If it happens at all it will be in fits and starts - and even then there’s nothing that says new tariffs won’t be imposed overnight if they get too successful at it.
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The debate is null and void.
AI / Robotics will be here in 2-3 years (Optimus) and get progressively better.
Millions of high expertise workers available to work round the clock.
They don’t need social security, pension or healthcare.
The real story is not tariffs, it is AI. Don’t blink.
The cell phone was invented in 1973. It started selling a decade later. It took another decade to achieve any significant penetration.
Henry Ford’s first assembly line was in 1913; it didn’t make a significant impact in American businesses until the mid 1920’s.
Tesla was founded in 2003. It introduced its first model in 2008, but arguably the real first introduction was in 2012.
Robots, at least the kind you are describing, won’t be a thing for at least a decade, probably longer. Things never move as fast as some people think.
(There are a few things that move faster: Google, Microsoft, even Amazon, etc. but it’s harder for things that need to be assembled and troubleshooted, the quicktime superstars are not generally hardware manufacturers.)
They tell us India has lagged on infrastructure. They are aware and working to improve.
China has invested heavily in infrastructure. That is one of their advantages. Their economic planning and all in commitment to identified opportunities clearly works for them.
Robots and AI were invented many decades ago.
The current state and progress is relevant, not elapsed time.
Not the kind of robots you’re touting. Not the kind of AI you’re touting.
The current state is that they don’t exist. The progress is that maybe they’ll be able to be deployed in a few commercial test situations in a couple years.
$APPL share price increase and the PE expansion increase was mainly due to service revenue growth. Services had a great margin and was growing solidly. Now, that service business seems to be under attack. The APP store ruling, and the potential of losing $20 B from $GOOGL for search will decimate service revenue and margins will crash.
The biggest worry is, will this result in $APPL being re-rated, and the multiples compress. The below shows how margins expanded since 2019…
Here is a devastating article on Apple’s Siri…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-18/how-apple-intelligence-and-siri-ai-went-so-wrong
just to pile on… OpenAI is buying iPhone designer Jony Ive startup… signaling it is going to enter into device manufacturing…
Just like Google, Apple is being challenged on AI… Like Google, Apple has 2 billion installed base…
Apple, Google has not faced sever competition on their main product, revenue… AI is starting and getting interesting.
There are research notes, and other long-term Apple investors are coming out with estimates of the impact of tariff on Apple’s iPhone being produced outside US. One of the simplest and clean estimate is, most people are buying phone through the carrier, and their monthly cost will only go up by $3~$4, a scenario that preserves Apple’s margin and allows Apple to pass on the price hike to consumers and something that is within the consumer’s budget.
Looks like Apple will face public pressure by POTUS, but the tariffs are not high enough for Apple to change the behavior.
This separately bring the question of the effectiveness of the tariffs to change market behavior.
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Many of us, investors or not, are hooked on the whole OS, iOS systems, hardware, back from Apple ][+, ImageWriters, LaserWriters, and maybe even collect any Apple stuff we can find. I held off on our first iPhone until my best carrier, Verizon, joined in… Apple is a long term company, ripples of temporary irritants like we see in tariffs, will just muddy the waters a bit before being swept clear in a little while…
It’s just sad to see an entire party go numb, silent at the grift and garbage we see daily… Ethics, morals mean nothing to them… So destructive… Sad…
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