Analysts and supply-chain experts are not sold on the Trump Organization touting its new smartphone as being “built in the United States,” saying it’s far more likely the $499 device will actually be produced in China.
“Despite being advertised as an American-made phone, it is likely that this device will be initially produced by a Chinese ODM,” Blake Przesmicki, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in a note published Monday.
Even if the U.S. did have smartphone production capabilities, he said, the company would have to rely on components imported from overseas.
The Trump Organization did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Trump Organization executive vice president Eric Trump, for his part, admitted Trump Mobile would not initially be an entirely domestic endeavor.
“Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America,” Trump said on The Benny Show podcast on Monday, suggesting the device is being produced or assembled overseas before its August launch.
These barriers to expanding U.S. production are nearly universal in the industry, according to Przesmicki.
“Generally, no phones have been manufactured in the U.S. since the 2G era in over a decade,” Przesmicki told Fortune. “We have weaker supply chains, fewer capable employees in the smartphone sector, lower margins.”
Przesmicki suggested if any manufacturing of Trump-branded phones were to take place on American soil, it would be on a small scale, about 1,000 phones or fewer. Leo Gebbie, principal analyst at CCS Insight, told Fortune there’s “no serious chance” the Trump Organization has arranged for U.S. production of the T1 phones, especially before the August launch.
“The idea that this could be replicated in the U.S. in any sort of short- to medium-term time scale is fanciful,” Gebbie said. “It is an absolute pipe dream.”
Instead, according to Gebbie, the T1 phones will likely have their final assembly stage in the U.S., which would allow the company to avoid steep investments in domestic manufacturing by simply importing all components. This strategy, he said, could be closer to what the Trump Organization intended when it hailed phones “built” in the U.S.
“This absolutely does raise the specter of the Trump Organization mobile falling foul of the tariffs that have been instigated by the Trump administration,” Gebbie said.
“Ultimately, whether we’re talking about screens, whether we’re talking about camera technologies, whether we’re talking about chipsets and processors and smartphones, almost all of this comes from the same manufacturing hubs in Asia,” he added.
Gebbie suggested the Trump Organization’s emphasis on building its phone in the U.S—despite domestic manufacturing being unlikely—is to send a message to big companies that U.S. smartphone assembly is possible.
