“So is this Trump helping bail out ZTE in exchange for China stepping back from Iran and NK?”
Bottom line here is that with a lot of high-value ZTE jobs at stake, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Chinese threatened to lower the boom on Apple. At minimum, they could erase Apple’s Chinese sales, which amount to $50b. Given that almost all assembly is done in China, they could literally shut Apple down for several quarters. My guess is that between being shut out of China and the cessation of Chinese production, Apple could suffer a decline of $100b (~40%) in sales vs last year’s numbers. And the purchase of tooling on an emergency basis from non-Chinese sources, as well as the establishment of a new production base in a low cost labor country would probably cost tens of billions of dollars. In other words, Apple could see its earnings drop from $50b in 2017 to zero this year. That’s a lot of simoleons.
Hahahah. You all give God like attributes to the Chinese. You think they want all their high tech jobs to go away? You think that won’t ultimately be hugely damaging to their tenuous grip on power? The Chinese are not immune from uprisings. Just from the small bit that I read ZTE will come back under very different rules and will be true players going forward. Trump doesn’t tweet out of fear