Have you ever thought, how long does it take to make a smartphone? For that we recently went to the Chinese Vivo factory. The X200 Pro is built with a top of the line camera.
The factory, sitting along the southern coast of China, employs 8,000 workers. It’s incredibly organized. There are robots and workers side by side keeping the production flowing smoothly. That’s every 11.4 seconds when one of the 69 production lines rolls out a new phone.
Incredible Output
6,400 phones are produced daily through Vivo and its sub brand iQOO. About 10 minutes per phone go on the line. Vivo’s success comes from a highly automated system: 70 percent of the work is done by machines. But core tasks and their quality checks are still the purview of human workers.
A Huge, Organized Operation
It’s an incredible experience to walk through the factory. The workflow is in the complete control. A complete detail is kept under control so that a mistake doesn’t happen anywhere during assembly — there are processors attached, there are screens secured. They are remarkably clean too. Coats, shoe covers and hat are required for all visitors.
Rigorous Durability Tests
There is a dedicated testing area in the factory as well. Here, phones, like nearly everything else, go through extreme stress tests to make sure they meet market standards. For example: they are dropped from 1.5 meters over and over again to test durability.
Phones are slammed repeatedly in a drum running at 200 revolutions per minute, simulating hundreds of drops. These include extreme temperature changes, USB connection cycle(s), and waterproof.
Precision and Quality
Vivo knows that its testing processes do not permit any room for chance. It check everything — temperature resilience, screen durability, water resistance — on every phone. This guarantees the customer high quality, reliable devices.
And at the end it’s nice to see how companies like Vivo strike a balance between automation and human quality checks. They demand perfection that, when they are achieved, their stand up to the expectations of everyday use.