But more than 50% of iPhone value is Chinese made.
Materials, labour, machine time, big part of ICs, batteries, passives, cabling, etc.
So, China actually double taxes own manufacturers aside from Apple itself.
The meme that "only $20" of iPhones value stays in China" is completely wrong. China makes tons of money from Apple.
Oh very much so. That's why China is careful about starting a trade war with Apple. They want to get their own manufacturers up to speed to replace Apple, but they don't want to just kick Apple out of China in one stroke and penalize the Chinese businesses that depend upon Apple.
If it wasn't for that, Apple and their strong privacy approach would be Persona Non Grata, IM-uninformed-O.
Apple tries to be less public about them having HUUGE R&D and business units in China with lots of things being done here.
In 2016 they posted a tiny press release about them opening their "first" R&D centre in China in Shenzhen, and deliberately making an impression of it having no significant role.
In reality, it was their _third_ RnD centre in Shenzhen only. Besides their nominal "design centre" in Kerry plaza, they rent a whole building in Discovery park in Nanshan, and have own section in Foxconn campus. The rumor is that they also rent yet another office for their product/project management staff somewhere closer to Longhua.
If some portion of the phone is imported, and that portion has duties, under normal circumstances Apple's subcontractor would import that thing, pay the duty on it, then export the phone and file for the duties to be refunded.
If the phone stays in China, the duty applies. So there may be duties involved if there are materials imported to China for assembly.
I don't know all of the details, but I recall working with something like that twenty-five years ago, and usually there are a lot of tax breaks and so forth, because most of what's getting manufactured is exported. Jobs stay, products go.
So if you then sell those products in the same country, they want some of the taxes and and so forth.
The alternative would be to charge all the taxes, then manufacturers would file paperwork to get a refund for the goods they exported.
This system streamlines that for the case where the intent is to export more than is sold domestically.