Factory Tour in China

Recently I had a chance to accompany the GSLG to a factory tour to Hongqi Town/Zhuhai which is around the corner from Macau on the Mainland.

Although it was not such an exciting highlight than last year's Mattell factory tour (but then again who can compete with thousands of Barbie Dolls...) it was very interesting and informative.

We had the opportunity to get a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a plant for transformers and inductors which are used for electronic devices (for example: lighting, computers, cell phones, displays, TV's and many more) For about 1 1/2 hours 4 very knowledgable guides led us through various production areas over two floors. Roughly 4.000 employees are working on hundreds of workstations, similar to assembly lines. The 90% female and 10% male workers are aged between 19-25 and have to master 11 hour shifts during the day (with a 30 min. lunch break plus two 10 min. shortbreaks) and 10 hour shifts during nighttime. The reason for hiring mostly younger females is the fact that they a) still have excellent eyesight and are b) very skillful with their fingers - necessary to wind thin pieces of wire around gazillions of tiny ferrites or coilformers. Most of the employees are living in dormitories close by, provided by the company and are saving their salaries to support their families and build up their own existence somewhere in a poorer mainland region. During all our starring and chatting they never looked up once, continuing to function like robots. Talking about it - although the majority of the work flow is still managed manually, slowly but surely some of the manufacturing is being replaced with very modern machinery. The yearly production number of these components is currently about 300 million.

Once again we left with the awareness of being blessed to lead such a mostly carefree life.