Apple in talks with suppliers to make MacBooks in Thailand

Apple is in talks with suppliers to make MacBooks in Thailand as the company continues to expand its manufacturing footprint outside of China amid geopolitical uncertainties.

The company has also been mass producing its Apple Watch in Thailand for more than a year, sources told Nikkei Asia, further underscoring the growing importance of the country, and Southeast Asia more broadly, as an alternative production base to China.

The Apple suppliers involved in the talks already have manufacturing complexes in Thailand for other clients and are discussing possible assembly and production of components and modules for MacBooks, according to sources from three suppliers directly involved in the conversations with Apple.

The US tech giant plans to begin mass producing MacBooks in Vietnam in the first half of this year, Nikkei Asia earlier reported, the first time the flagship product will be made outside China.

Shifting production away from China is difficult for Apple and its suppliers, given they have spent decades building a massive supply chain in the country. In his first trip to China in three years, Apple CEO Tim Cook last month lauded his company's "symbiotic kind of relationship" with the country.

But the geopolitical tensions that have forced the iPhone maker to rethink its supply chain show few signs of easing. A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party last week met tech executives, including Cook and Disney CEO Bob Iger, to discuss China.

Apple has gradually moved some production capacity for AirPods, the Apple Watch, iPads and MacBooks to northern Vietnam in recent years. The number of Apple suppliers in the country increased to 25 in 2021 from 14 in 2018, when the trade war started escalating, according to Nikkei Asia's analysis of the company's official list of suppliers.

This growth has made the Southeast Asian country a key beneficiary of the trend toward supply chain diversification. However, many suppliers have encountered labour shortages, particularly of skilled technicians and engineers, due to the sharp increase in demand for such workers, several industry sources said.