Tim Cook and Donald Trump in a meeting at the White House in 2018
Trump has signed a trade deal with China that will see it withdraw the rare minerals ban that affects iPhones, though it still leaves US consumers paying far more for imported goods.
Among the responses to Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, China halted rare earth mineral exports in April 2025. Now according to multiple sources including Reuters, that ban may be lifted.
There are few details so far, and no confirmation of whether all such rare mineral exports will resume. The news broke as Trump casually mentioned “we signed with China yesterday,” and officials subsequently revealed that the deal was made earlier in the week.
What is being said repeatedly is that in return for the rare earth minerals, the US will ease its restrictions on Chinese technology. It’s believed that this means the US dropping or reducing export constraints on materials such as ethane, which is used in processor manufacture.
“The administration and China agreed to an additional understanding for a framework to implement the Geneva agreement,” said a White House official. The official also said that this understanding is “about how we can implement expediting rare earths shipments to the U.S. again.”
There is of course also no information all about when shipments may resume, but US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has implied that the US will wait for China to make the first move.
“They’re going to deliver rare earths to us,” Lutnick said, and then “we’ll take down our countermeasures.”
Trump has also said that there may be a separate deal coming that would shortly “open up” India.
Lutnick has further said that there will be a series of key trade deals finalized in the next two weeks. He said this is to meet Trump’s July 9 deadline to reinstate the higher tariffs he paused in April.
“We’re going to do top ten deals, put them in the right category, and then these other countries will fit behind,” said Lutnick.
“Those who have deals will have deals, and everybody else that is negotiating with us, they’ll get a response from us and then they’ll go into that package,” he continued. “If people want to come back and negotiate further, they’re entitled to, but that tariff rate will be set and off we’ll go”
Lutnick did not name any of the claimed ten deals, nor confirm that India was one of them.
What happens next
While any deal between the US and China must be preferable to the volatile impact of the “reciprocal” tariffs, there is too little detail yet to determine if trade tensions will be significantly reduced.
However, China’s halting of rare earth minerals was not solely for the import of such materials into the continental US. If it had been, then the chief impact on Apple would be in however much it affected the TSMC operation in Arizona.
What China did, though, was require all buyers to be approved through new licensing regulations. It’s not known whether this also affected TSMC in Taiwan, but according to law firm Taylor Wessing, it did have unexpected impacts across the world.
Plus on June 11, 2025, Trump said on social media that the forthcoming deal with China would see the US “getting a total of 55% tariffs.” As ever, tariffs are paid by the companies importing goods, never by the providing country as Trump routinely claims.
So if the final deal does include this claimed tariff, Apple and all US companies that import from China will face steeper costs than before. Prior to the start of Trump’s “reciprocal” announcement in April, which had nothing to do with tariffs applied by other countries, US companies were paying around 15% in tariffs, and Apple was paying significantly less.
Apple has already announced that it expects to spend $900 million on tariffs in its June quarter. Plus it made many costly changes to its global distribution lines to mitigate as much of the tariff impact as it could, but it remains that higher costs will surely be passed on to consumers.
