Day 8: Visit of Huawei and Foxconn City

By Marc Laperrouza July 16, 2015 Edition CHIC 2014-2015

An early start (7.30AM) for one of the most exciting industrial visit. The bus headed to Dongguan, the industrial area of Shenzhen. After a 90 minute drive we arrived at the gates of Huawei for the visit of the P7 Mate production line. The visit started with two exposes from David (Head of Global Government Affairs) and Xiaoming (Quality Engineer) covering both Huawei’s global strategy and product development cycle. Students were invited to a platter of fruits during the Q&A session.

Q&A session at Huawei

Q&A session at Huawei

We then moved on to the production line – no CHIC pictures as no phones are allowed into the plant.

You will need to imagine a 40 meters line starting with a blank PCB and ending with a box containing 8 packaged phones fully tested. Testing aside, workers on the (largely automatised) line can produce up to 2’000 phones per day, reaching 99.45% of quality.

Huawei CHIC

Lunch was served in one of Huawei’s cantine – imagine the logistics behind feeding 20’000 persons almost at the same time before a quick tour of the other Huawei campuses nearby.

The second part of the day was very much interesting too. We were invited to present the CHIC project in the newly founded makerspace of Foxconn!

Foxconn makerspace

Foxconn makerspace

The session was introduced by David Li (founder of Shanghai’s Xinchejian). After a brief presentation of CHIC, the 3 teams pitched their projects in a packed and very (very) warm atmosphere. We were then taken to the center of Foxconn City (200’000 workers) and allowed into a plastic injection moulding workshop.

Foxconn City

Foxconn City