Walking the production lines of a company that makes smartphones makes you realize the hundreds of processes and components that are needed just for you to be able to send a WhatsApp message with your mobile. For a few days, from 20bits we have been able to get up close and personal with the production operations in China of Honor, one of the largest technology companies in the Asian country that in Spain It is gradually gaining ground since 2021 compared to other older competitors. In fact, according to Canalys, the firm slipped into the Top 5 in Europe in the last quarter of 2023.
After acquiring its independence as a brand in 2020Honor has made a is committed to innovation that can be seen in the factory and R&D laboratory that we visited in Shenzhenthe technological capital of China. In fact, the company’s global Product Manager, Robin Wu, explained to us that at least 10% of the company’s profits are invested in research and development, even reaching 11.5% last year — the highest figure in the industry.
The objective of this bet? In Wu’s own words, The goal is to reach the Top 3 in the sector through three elements: design, photography and artificial intelligence. To achieve this, Honor has more than 70% of its staff dedicated to R&D, which translates into about 9,000 employees. And many of them are located in the Shenzhen facilities that we have met in person.
This is how a mobile phone is made: we visit an Honor production plant in China
He Shenzhen Honor Intelligent Manufacturing Industrial Park is one of the most advanced and avant-garde of the company, with 85% of your processes automated —of which 60% is developed by its own R&D team—. Opened in 2021, there hundreds of robots and autonomous machines work busily to place each small piece and assemble each small element so that the final result is perfect.
In this center part of the magic of the firm is made and hides the secrets of how some of its most desired phones are madelike the Honor Magic6 Proone of his flagships 2024, or Honor Magic V3the brand’s third generation of folding products and the finest in the segment on the European market—in fact, worldwide, it is only surpassed by the Mate XT, the new triple mobile fold from Huawei—.
These secrets must continue to be kept well, so that The first step to discovering this wonderland is to put down your phone. and any device with which you can take photographs at the entrance of this immense production plant located on the outskirts of Shenzhen, a southern city of 17 million inhabitants that they have called the ‘Silicon Valley of China’.
All the technology that this center includes allows Honor produces a smartphone new every 28.5 seconds, with more than 2,000 components and having gone through about 120,000 processes. However, if we are talking about unique devices, each unit takes approximately three days to build, as it must go through not only assembly, but also all the exhaustive quality checks.
For example, aging tests —which at Honor are made within the same assembly line, unlike most manufacturers in the industry, which separate them— They take a total of about 10 hours. It consists of carrying out more than 150 prediction tests that “quickly detect quality problems and shorten the testing and rotation period,” says the firm.
Currently in this plant, The company has more than twenty automatic production lineseach of which has an extension of approximately 150 meters.
While you travel those 150 meters You can see how each piece is assembled from a ‘virgin’ motherboard to having a complete mobile and put in his packaging. One of the most impressive stations is an automatic precision assembly machine to install the 89° super-curved screen used in the smartphones from Honor that, according to the firm, “can achieve an assembly precision of up to 75 microns (approximately the diameter of a hair).”
“Quality control is ensured from the manufacturing phase to the testing phase through close monitoring of each step of the assembly line. When an anomaly is detected, an alert is triggered followed by timely correction of the problem“, they explain from the company.
This manufacturing frenzy responds to a demand from users. According to market analysis company IDC, In 2023, 1,170 million units of smartphoneswhich, although it represents a decrease of 3.2% compared to the previous year, is still an impressive figure and, in addition, a recovery that would reach 1,210 million units sold is expected by 2024.
