Vivo, a Chinese tech company owned by BBK Electronics, specialising in its exceptional camera features and multimedia functions, is an especially popular brand amongst young millenniums.  

Founded in Dongguan, Guangzhou province — a place where at least 200,000 people are engaged in the production, sales and maintenance of the smartphone business. Between January to September 2018, a total amount of 246 million phones were shipped from Dongguan, up 7.3% year-on-year, accounting for 24% of global smartphone shipments. With that said, at least 1 out of every 5 global smartphones is made in Dongguan, namely “smartphone town”.

Following the latest gaming smartphone iQOO’s recent release, PingWest made its visit to the Vivo factory to learn about its production and testing behind the billion dollar business.

How is iQOO born?

M8 factory was the first stop, where the production line was responsible for the main board’s SMT (Surface Mount Technology) chip packaging. SMT is among the most popular electronic mounting technology in the current e-assembly industry.

After this fully automatic production line, a bare PCB board will be coated with wire to achieve the full packaging of the main board components. Snapdragon 855 is automatically hosted on the main board.

A dozen of machines are connected into one production line, each responsible for packaging different components. A PCB board is composed of four main boards which are automatically cut, wired and sealed. Vivo introduced its ultra-accurate MPM dual-track printing machine with 25um printing accuracy from U.S. and Fuji NXT mounter 3rd generation from Japan.

Each production line is only equipped with two workers responsible for testing. The whole PCB board will be re-tested after it’s packaged. More than 90% of the making process are automatically completed by the mechanical arm.

These employees work double shifts to ensure full production on the production line.

“Comprehensiveness and high standard are the two most valued aspects of our quality control.” said Vivo. The former represents the extreme attention to detail, while the latter means the demanding ‘Vivo’ quality.

Here are just some examples of its brutal quality testings in the O3 lab:

Bending over in trousers

Cable plugging in and out for 24hrs non-stop 

Twisting the test cable in different directions to see its stability

Dumping the phone in the rolling machine

Dropping and squeezing the phone for 24hrs non-stop

Storing the phones in extreme temperatures, above 75 degrees and below 40 degrees

‘Vivo Park’

‘Vivo Park’ is an industrial base planning project constitutes of M8 & M1 factory, and O3 lab. The name is derived from ‘Apple Park’ because of their similar shapes and layout. 

According to the employees, the project covers more than 900 acres, with a construction area of 178 acres. There will be employee cantine and cafeteria, entertainment area, dorms, and even bigger production lines. After its completion, it will become an “all-in-one” park that integrate production, lifestyle, office, research and development. The annual smartphone sales volume is to exceed 36 million, and the annual output value to over 60 billion RMB.

According to IDC’s 2018 report, Vivo ranked third in the Chinese mobile phone market with 76 million sales, up 10.8% year-on-year. The company currently has 30,000 employees on the production line.

Now there are over 450,000 shipment orders on JD.com for the iQOO model, which has exceeded Vivo’s expectation. 

“We keep it low key, as is the style for iQOO.” said marketing director Yunfei.