A look into where OPPO’s phones are made

OPPO may not be well known in the West, but the Chinese brand has seriously been making waves in China as well as neighboring countries like the Philippines. Their strong focus on photography as well as the selfie market has seen the brand soar in both local and international sales charts, putting them just behind fellow domestic rival Huawei in IDC’s latest tally. Call it an interesting coincidence then that we found ourselves roaming the halls of their Shenzen-based factory, staring into rows upon rows of factory workers quietly hunched over their stations inspecting parts that automated machines spat out into their production lines.

While OPPO’s factory wasn’t the first tech manufacturing plant that we visited, it’s one of the biggest and busiest that we’ve ever seen. One section of the factory has around 13 lines dedicated to phone assembly, and each line is capable of pumping out 300 phones an hour to meet demand for the company’s fast selling devices.

Just like other phone companies, OPPO sources several of the parts used in their phones from domestic and international suppliers, stuff like the display, memory, storage and camera modules. But unlike some companies, OPPO makes their own motherboards, printed circuit boards that serve as the pathway to said components.

Each board is printed and created via an automated process, and is analyzed and checked by both computers and people to ensure that each mainboard printed falls within OPPO’s strict quality control measures.

Once the board is printed, it’s taken to the assembly line to join all the other components that are put together to form the phone. The line is a mix of both human and robots, and each component is thoroughly tested through each assembly step to make sure that the product stays within spec.

Everything is fast, efficient and almost robotic, and supervisors make sure that their team meet their hourly quota to meet the demand for whatever OPPO smartphone is in vogue – in our case, the dual-camera R11.

After a batch of phones are finished, OPPO takes around 12% of the phones from the line for a battery of tests to ensure that particular batch stays within spec. Every conceivable failure point is tested by OPPO, from the side buttons that endure hundreds and thousands of presses, to the calibration of the cameras, the repeated plugging of the USB port, down to how much force it takes to bend/flex your phone.

There’s even several iterations of the ever entertaining drop test, which sees the phones dropped from several heights as well as a tumble machine that does entirely as advertised. After each run of the test, the phones are inspected for damage.

OPPO boasts that their testing protocols are actually higher than the national average, which means their phones go through more rigorous testing than the average phone sold in China.

Our visit to OPPO’s Shenzen factory gave us a rare glimpse of the inner workings of the company. We’ll be sharing more about OPPO’s imaging heritage in a future post. Stay tuned.