The location is just outside of Beijing, at Xiaomi’s latest factory to build its flagship phones. Inside the factory, the room was quiet, save for the hum of a lot of machines, most of them with Xiaomi’s square-shaped yellow “Mi” logo on the front of them. They’re moving back and forth, tossing the backside of phone bodies and internals from one station to the next, to and fro, at least four at a time, every 10 seconds.
There are very few people in the room, glaringly so. A handful of workers place phones into boxes. Others do quality assurance, checking to see that screens work and there are no visible defects. One worker in a pink dust-proof suit troubleshoots a machine that broke down on our tour, but the noises in the factory are those of machinery. These machines, many of them self-developed and made by Xiaomi itself, automate the hyper-technical, very specialized screwing and connecting that goes into creating a phone, like the tight soldering and circuit work that aren’t easy for most humans to do. It wasn’t just a feeling, either; Xiaomi’s plant manager explained that the whole plant was 83% automated. The plant manager said that the factory is on average, capable of churning out one phone every six seconds.
