No... none of the money Apple pays to China for the manufacturing of the device goes into Apple's pockets.
What I mean by this is that suppose you order an iPhone from Apple for $1,000. It gets drop shipped from China to your home.
The imported item, the $1,000 iPhone, is counted in our trade deficit as the full $1,000 going to China. That is, we calculate the trade deficit by looking at the declared value of the imported item as it crosses the border from China to the United States, and in the case of your iPhone, we presume we just lost $1,000 to China, never to be seen again.
But here's the thing: Foxconn, the company who assembled the iPhone and who drop shipped it to you, only gets $50 to assemble and ship the phone. Yes, that's $50 that Apple doesn't get--Apple pays $50 to Foxconn. And note that there are other costs that go to other companies: Apple pays money to TSMC to manufacture the processor, they pay to Samsung for the display, they pay to other companies around the world for the other components--including money to other Chinese manufacturers.
But at the end of the day, even though we count the full $1,000 value of the iPhone as a trade imbalance with China, the reality is companies all around the world got a small piece of that $1,000 total cost.
That is, a Taiwan company got money for the SoC, a Japanese company got some money for the camera module, a European company got money for the gyroscope technology, a South Korea company got money for the display, etc., etc., etc.
And Apple makes almost $500 in profit.
In other words, and this is my point: while we credit the full $1,000 as a trade imbalance to China--half that money actually winds up in Cupertino.
But wait! Our trade imbalance numbers are even worse than that! Many of the items that are in your $1,000 iPhone are technologies manufactured by, or designed by, other American companies who get a substantial profit from those compnents. Qualcomm (in California) licenses the modem, Corning (out of New York) provides the glass, Micron (out of Idaho) provides the DRAM/NAND memory core, etc., etc.
So while our trade imbalance credits the full value of the $1,000 phone that was just drop shipped to you from China after you ordered it from Apple, it's quite likely somewhere around 35% of the actual build cost (the $500 used to make the phone) flows back to America. Meaning that while our statistics suggest we just had a $1,000 trade imbalance with China, the reality is perhaps $700 of that stays in or flows back to America.
This means the trade imbalance statistics are **WOEFULLY** inaccurate in representing the real world.