Covid-19 crisis: Donald Trump may tax firms manufacturing outside US

US President Donald Trump has threatened to slap new taxes on American companies to dissuade them from moving their manufacturing bases from China to countries like India and Ireland, instead of their own, amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an interview with Fox Business News, Trump said taxation was an incentive for companies to return manufacturing bases to the US.

“Apple said now they’re going to go to India. They’re going to do some production in India away from China,” he was asked.

“If they do, you know, we gave Apple a little bit of a break because they’re competing with a company that was a part of a trade deal that we made. So it was a little bit unfair to Apple, but we’re not allowing this anymore,” Trump said. “You know if we wanted to put up our own border like other countries do to us, Apple would build 100 per cent of its products in the United States. That’s the way it would work.”

According to reports, Apple is looking to shift a significant portion of its production to India from China.

Supply lines of many tech companies manufacturing in China were disrupted after the deadly Covid-19 outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

“These companies have to get on the ball because they’re going not only to China — you look at where they’re going — they’re going to India and they’re going to Ireland and they’re going all over the place, they make them,” Trump said.

Asked whether he would consider giving companies tax breaks to return manufacturing operations to the US, Trump said he might tax them if they didn’t and suggested they had a duty to re-shore operations. “One incentive, frankly, is to charge tax for them when they make product outside. We don’t have to do much for them. They have to do for us,” Trump said.

US officials say Trump’s administration is “turbocharging” efforts to push companies to move production away from China, partly as a way to punish Beijing for its early handling of the coronavirus outbreak.