HONOR HAS A SPECIAL FACTORY THAT ONLY MAKES ITS FLAGSHIP PHONES, AND WE PAID IT A VISIT

Given how stifling and technical each factory tour could be, you'd assume we'd grow more numb with each new visit. Our latest jaunt to Honor's crucibles of phones, however, proved us so wrong. Given how stifling and technical each factory tour could be, you'd assume we'd grow more numb with each new visit. Our latest jaunt to Honor's crucibles of phones, however, proved us so wrong.

- LIU HONGZUO

Secondly, the factory visit was quickly followed up with another high-value asset: Honor’s Shenzhen R&D Lab, launched in 2023. This is where the fabled smartphone research happens.

New discoveries here eventually lead to improvements like better photos, battery life, and display technologies we see in smartphones today. Naturally, having such a cool “factory + lab tour” meant plenty of restrictions.

Unlike the other visits to rival factories of OPPO and Samsung phones, Honor said this tour doesn't allow any photography, videography, or even a live smartphone for note-taking on the manufacturing or R&D floors. Documenting the visit was fascinating and painful all at once, but we made do somehow. Without further ado:

Honor's “flagship-only” smartphone factory

In short, this plant, which specialises in making flagship-only smartphones, meant that every corner of the floorspace could make, ensure, and control its manufacturing quality beyond what humans and artificial intelligence (AI) can achieve alone.

It has a whopping 85% automation rate, meaning only 15% of the process requires human intervention. That 15% is put to excellent use, with human specialists making sure that the automated lines do not make mistakes, and the next AI in line can also catch if the human missed something crucial. Much of its manufacturing nature is complementary: for example, it falls upon a human to operate a dust-free room to install high-quality camera lenses onto each phone properly, but it also comes down to AI to catch little things on the assembly line, like dust as tiny as 40 microns. Not a single effort is wasted, which results in Honor being able to produce up to two flagship phones per minute on each belt.