TradingKey - The Trump Organization has announced its latest venture — entering the telecommunications and smartphone manufacturing industry with the launch of Trump Mobile, a branded mobile network service, and the T1 smartphone, priced at $499.
However, experts have cast serious doubts over the commercial viability of the project, citing intense market competition and the near-impossibility of fully producing smartphones on U.S. soil.
On Monday, June 16, the Trump Organization unveiled plans to launch “Trump Mobile,” a branded mobile network service, with a monthly plan priced at $47.45 , symbolizing Donald Trump’s position as the 45th and 47th U.S. president.
In addition, the Trump family company said it will release its own Android 15-powered, gold-plated “T1” smartphone in September. On the product page, the phone features the slogan “Make America Great Again”, Trump’s signature campaign motto.
Eric Trump, one of the president’s sons, stated that while the first batch of phones won’t be made in the U.S., the company aims to eventually produce all devices domestically. “We have to bring manufacturing back here,” he said.
However, given the complex global supply chains, high labor costs, and the reality that nearly all smartphones sold in the U.S. are manufactured overseas, the current state of American manufacturing infrastructure makes large-scale domestic smartphone production effectively impossible.
Some critics called the idea of a $499 “Made-in-America” smartphone nothing short of misleading advertising.
Tinglong Dai, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School, said, “There’s absolutely no way you could make the screen, get that memory, camera, battery, everything.”
Dai estimated that the U.S. would need at least five years to build the necessary infrastructure to make domestic smartphone production feasible.
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