Technology

I'm assuming there must be downtime for maintenance and quality checks.

Especially since it says 11 production lines...

11 lines = 57.8 million

57.8/~10 means their lines are down 38.5% of the time?!?!?

Edit: Maybe the nearly 40% downtime is retooling for different models?

That was my reaction to the headline. Then I read the article:

Xiaomi said assembling a smartphone from circuit board to finished product takes about six seconds, and, at full capacity, the factory could produce more than 10 million devices annually

They are indeed stating each phone only takes 6 seconds to complete

With ~30 million seconds in a year, their output is 1 phone every 3 seconds

Xiaomi said assembling a smartphone from circuit board to finished product takes about six seconds, and, at full capacity, the factory could produce more than 10 million devices annually.

That sounds like the final assembly takes six seconds, which is entirely plausible given how fast robots move.

Not even that. For example if there are 10 assembly lines in parallel that the slowest step takes 60 seconds, you still get a phone each 6 seconds

Also that’s not that impressive. 30 million devices is roughly one per second year round. Phone manufacturers make many times that in a year.

He is the single human with the most manufacturing knowledge in the world, after all.