Most of the demand (in terms of dollars/euros) is confined to the developed world. What happens when both US and EU want to bring back operations back to the home countries? Then these companies are left with serving less of the global demand.
If the tarrifs stay high, then US consumption will plummet since all goods will now be that much more expensive and people won't be able to afford as much.
If tariffs go down then moving manufacturing to the US was the losing choice for any company that chooses to do so.
Either way betting on current US consumption levels with US manufactured goods is a losing bet.
The backdoor is bringing heavily automated factories to the US. The viability of this might still be mixed right now, but at least in the future, even without tariffs, the golden goose of manufacturing is still "locally made by robots."
They invest in Africa and Southeast Asia, and everywhere else that isn’t American/Western Europe, and create demand that way. What do you Xi has been doing for the last 10+ years with Silk Road? China already had a plan for this trade war.
China is essentially acting like a VC fund. They spread money around everywhere... and get a ton of benefits in return. Local autocrats just love China because their money doesn't come with strings attached (such as IWF or EU/US aid), they get to spend down a chunk of their massive dollar forex reserves, provide a ton of people from their poor provinces with work (Chinese foreign construction projects usually don't hire local labor!), and build up soft power in the population of the countries where they invest.
I'm hoping that wasn't a racist comment (that those other countries aren't worth it for some reason), I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. There is a lot of potential in emerging markets, potential that the Americans have ignored to their detriment (as we are experiencing now, we basically have no leverage over China because they expanded their markets enough over the course of a decade).
It's a reference to a movie called "Empire of Dust" where a chinese-led team has a hard time building infrastructure in Africa.
Whether or not some third world country is worth developing is an economic question, not a moral one. And even if it is, the question of whether or not you will be able to monetize that relationship by the end of it is another one. What the chinse are doing now is basically IMF-style debt trapping of other nations, which doesn't seem like a successful strategy historically.
The bottom line is that if the natives don't want to cooperate with whatever civilization you're building, it's not going to work out. Look at what happened to the USA in afganistan (and pretty much every empire that stepped foot in there). I don't think that's racist, I think it is pretty optimistic outlook towards the sovereignty of nations.
There is a really great movie called Bitter Lake about this, by Adam Curtis.
The Europeans seem to have become more free trade curious after recent events so this doesn't seem like it will hold up as a "what if". And I expect that the coming months of US-only inflation are just going to confirm that position for them even i they face a mild recession due to US market access/demand collapse issues.
The EU has always been on the side of free trade (agreements with Turkiye, Canada, Japan, Mercosur, the failed TTIP etc have been worked on for many years).
But it's also always been protective of the internal market and e.g. added tariffs on Chinese steel recently.
Only about 1B people in EU+US. Majority of people only need one phone. If I were a cell manufacturer, I'd drive down costs to service the other 7B people.
Of course, you won't make the same margins as EU+US business. Not sure if that is enough incentive to onshore consumer manufacturing.
The margins get really thin after the first 2 billion or so. Middle income globally is ~10-20 PPP dollars a day and that's only ~17% of the world's population. They're generally radically different phones between markets too no one's really dominating the cheap phone market.
The margins are only thin if you're used to 40% as Apple has been. They're not at all so thin that the rest of the pack aren't making actual profit filling the gap for the other 7B people who aren't well off westerners.
