Apple and Micron launch a China chip lobbying war, leaving Trump in a difficult bind

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Golden Finance News, July 27, citing a July 24 report by The Wall Street Journal: hit by a global surge in storage chip prices, Apple CEO Tim Cook has recently led a lobbying effort targeting senior figures including Trump, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and the Secretary of the Treasury, to seek approval for overseas sales of products such as the iPhone and Mac using memory chips from CXMT and Yangtze Memory. Apple said this move can broaden its supply chain, ease chip shortages, and lower terminal electronics prices, and that devices using domestically made chips will not flow into the U.S. domestic market.
The plan has been fiercely resisted by Micron, the only major large-scale memory manufacturer in the U.S. Micron executives warned the government that even if products are sold only overseas, allowing purchases of China’s memory chips would disrupt the U.S. domestic memory industry and could repeat the past scenario in which U.S. manufacturing was driven into decline as it was squeezed by low-priced overseas products. Micron proposed relying on its own $250B U.S. capacity expansion plan to address the supply gap, and it opposed loosening restrictions on chip procurement from China.
CXMT and Yangtze Memory had already been added by the U.S. to a list of entities involved in military activities. The two U.S. companies’ demands are completely at odds, leaving the Trump administration facing a policy dilemma between balancing consumer market costs and protecting the domestic semiconductor industry. At present, related approvals have not reached any clear conclusion. This round of storage chip price increases is expected to last until 2027. Apple’s multiple devices have already seen significant price hikes, and cost pressure continues to rise.
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