We visited Honor’s smart factory in Shenzhen

Shenzhen, the heart of Chinese industry, hosts the manufacturing sites of most of the tech giants. Still recently affiliated with its former parent brand, Huawei, Honor dreams of taking over internationally. And to convince of its independence as well as its capacity for innovation, it boasts of owning one of the rare “intelligent” factories. Quezaco?

The site in question is located on a campus including a research and development center dedicated in particular to the optimization of folding screens integrated into the flagships of the brand – including its new Magic V2 – and the tools necessary for the quality control of finished products: various machines test the resistance of devices to falls, others check the performance of their antennas or their SAR… But the highlight of the show is this so-called smart production site, open at the end of 2021 — Honor says it has spent 1 billion yuan, or about 126 million euros, and intends to continue investing. Cosmonaut outfit required to observe one of its production lines, and photographs prohibited.

The lair of premium smartphones

The line that we were able to discover still measures 150 meters, and aligns the machines assembling the finest elements (SoC, RAM, etc.) within the devices. The brand says that 80% of the tasks needed to create a smartphone are automated in 2023, compared to 75% in 2022; and indeed, only operations involving the manipulation of larger elements remain the prerogative of flesh and blood employees, until the packaging of finished smartphones and their packaging in crates ready to be shipped. Total duration of the operation? 28.5 seconds to produce a smartphone, Honor assures us, for a total production capacity of which a representative of the brand assures us that it represents 2400 products per day and per production line, on twenty lines in total, 6 days out of 7, with a success rate of 99%.

It should be noted that only the Magic 5 Pro, Magic V and Magic Vs are manufactured in these places, and that the brand ensures that the entire production of the said devices takes place in this factory. The brand’s other terminals – outside the premium segment, therefore – are entrusted to the care of partner factories, including BYD Electronics.

Fast and almost fully automated production… but not for folders

However, these figures only concern part of the production, that of smartphones in the “classic” monoblock format, and therefore the Magic 5 Pro. That of folding models has indeed escaped our attention, on the grounds that the manufacturer refuses to estimate the time necessary to develop a smartphone of this type: in this specific case, the production lines have more interventions human (the automation is less than the 80% announced, with lower success rates than for single-piece smartphones), and the preparation time is getting longer. Alex Pang, who heads the manufacturing department at Honor, will say no more, but specifies that for the time being, this is due to economic reasons: if the installation of suitable machines on a production line only takes a few weeks, it remains too expensive to date in view of the number of terminals manufactured.

But that can change, Honor is now targeting the international market with its folding models – the Magic Vs was released in Europe and the Magic V2 will follow the same path. Finally, remember that in a context of decline in the mobile market, Honor is one of the few brands to be growing, in proportions, however, disproportionate to market leaders Samsung and Apple. The Counterpoint institute thus noted in the spring that Honor accounted for around 5% of smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2023, which ranked it sixth in its sector, behind Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo.