Beating Apple, Xiaomi and the gang in China

DONGGUAN, a southerly Chinese city near Hong Kong, is better known for cranking out cheap trinkets than for producing high-end equipment of any kind. And yet, amid the grit and grime is a gleaming low-rise factory producing some 50m smartphones a year for OPPO, a firm started by China's BBK Electronics but which is now run independently.Inside, as well as the usual assembly lines and serried workers, the factory has dozens of staff in quality engineering and testing, conducting 130 different tests on OPPO's phones before they are released to the market. Such zealous pursuit of quality would be expected of factories that produce phones for Apple'the world-class facilities run by Taiwan's Foxconn in nearby Shenzhen house similar teams. But it is unusual at a firm that makes relatively inexpensive handsets for the local market.OPPO, and its sister firm, Vivo, also a child of BBK, started out in 2004 and 2009 respectively, making cheap and cheerful phones like plenty of other obscure Chinese manufacturers. They probably didn't even register on Apple's radar. Xiaomi was the Chinese handset-maker to watch; urban sophisticates, enticed by...Continue reading
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