[ksec]

>Apple’s $430 billion in contributions to the US economy include direct spend with American suppliers, data center investments, capital expenditures in the US, and other domestic spend — including dozens of Apple TV+ productions across 20 states, creating thousands of jobs and supporting the creative industry.

I dont like how Apple spin this as investment in the headline, when it is clearly contribution. If you buy something at Walmart, or any of your daily needs, is that an investment in US?

And I dont know how that $430B is calculated.

Direct Spend with American Suppliers are mostly Corning for Front Glasses, Qualcomm for Modem and Patents. These two alone is close to $50B in five years.

Even if Apple spend $10B on Datacenter and $10B on Apple TV ( They dont ), Likely including all their employees salary, Rent for Apple Retail, basically every single dollar spend within US. The numbers still doesn't add up.

It reads to me Apple is doing their PR pieces on their contribution to US because Congress is now looking at them as enemies.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If you buy something at Walmart, or any of your daily needs, is that an investment in US?

If a company opens an office overseas and hires people, we call it foreign direct investment. Using the same math for domestic investment seems alright. It's money being pumped into the local economy, after all.

[mrweasel]

It reads like they're trying to avoid creating jobs in manufacturing directly, but will instead pick US suppliers and potentially let them hire lower skilled workers.

I wouldn't expect this to create that many jobs in manufacturing, it seems more like engineering and creative work, with a promise to prefer US suppliers, assuming they exists.

[andrewjl]

Yeah that sounds right, although I don't think they ever claimed or even implied that they themselves are creating manufacturing jobs. Even prior PR by them around creating domestic manufacturing jobs was showcasing their suppliers.

Barring a major transformation, I don't see Apple ever operating a factory, whether in the US or overseas.

[gowld]

That's a standard use of the term "investment" in the macroeconomic sense of exchanging money to get people to do work so they can pay other people to do work for them.

Ita because paying US people for that work is better for the personal development of (otherwise underemployed) US people than paying non-US people.

[skybrian]

Well, it’s all spending, but is all spending investment?

From an accounting perspective, when a business spends money on a factory it’s an investment since you end up with an asset on the balance sheets. But the same is true of spending on inventory. There are also intangible investments that don’t end up on balance sheets (like writing software) and for high tech companies that can be pretty substantial.

You could simplify this to “Apple says they’re going to spend a lot of money in the US.” Okay, I guess that’s good?

[dubcanada]

> I dont like how Apple spin this as investment in the headline, when it is clearly contribution. If you buy something at Walmart, or any of your daily needs, is that an investment in US?

You can argue yes, if you pay Walmart $50 for eggs and stuff. That means Walmart pays taxes (goes to the Gov), Walmart pays employees (so they can buy other stuff), Walmart buys a product (paying every individual person from shipping to receiving, etc). Opposite would be saying going to Canada and buying it all, and all you would pay would be an import fee. Or buying something from Aliexpress and getting free shipping, which is probably a net value on the US economy.

But you can also argue no, cause it's so small that it is almost insignificant.