We had the opportunity to travel to Shenzhen to visit one of MSI‘s production units. It’s a very special place, simply because we were lucky enough to visit it a (good) few years ago. And like China as a whole, things have changed a lot here too. MSI is a company headquartered in Taiwan. To produce its products, the company operates three large manufacturing plants located in Shenzhen, Kunshan and Taoyuan (Taiwan). The Shenzhen site was commissioned in the early 1980s (1983). It specialises in motherboards and graphics cards, but over the years it has also diversified its services, in particular by assembling PCs and servers. This diversification is mainly the result of the gradual automation of the site, to which we’ll return later.
MSIS (MSI Shenzhen): a gigantic site
The brand communicates very well on the gigantic scale of this site. Its facility covers an area of 200,000 m², equivalent to around 28 football pitches. It’s clearly a city within a city on the outskirts of Shenzhen. There are homes, shops, restaurants (for employees) and various services. This size allows for an impressive monthly production capacity, with 1,300,000 motherboards, 1,000,000 graphics cards, 500,000 desktop PCs, 70,000 servers and network equipment, as well as 200,000 electronic devices for automotive and commercial applications. Take these figures over the course of a year, and you get a potential 15 million motherboards…
Originally, the site was designed to accommodate around 15,000 workers, with capacity rising to 20,000 at peak. Production capacity for motherboards was between 3 and 5 million units for a full year. Today, automation is in full swing and there are ‘only’ 1,500 to 2,500 employees on site for a capacity of 15 million motherboards… But the site also produces PCs, servers, AIOs and graphics cards. Compared to the distant past of our first visit, the qualifications of the employees have risen considerably. As has the overall standard of living in Shenzhen, but that’s another (long) story to tell you.
110 metres to birth and pack a motherboard
This video shows the journey of a motherboard from its ‘birth’ to its final packaging. A journey of 110 metres (the length of this production line) that takes an average of 45 minutes. At the moment, you will notice that at the end of the journey, many manual steps are still necessary (quality control, tests, etc.). The site manager estimates that the level of automation is only 60%.
Life at the MSI Shenzhen site
As the site is on the outskirts of Shenzhen, life on site is organised to be practical and therefore productive. Studios are available for employees who come to work. We’re obviously not up to the standards of absolute luxury, but we’re a long way from the image people have of this type of accommodation. They are functional, clean, air-conditioned (essential in this region) and equipped with internet access. We didn’t have permission to take any photos, but believe me, some of the student studios in Paris are much scarier… On the other hand, they are rented out to employees for…6€ / month! On site you’ll find a library, a restaurant, a hairdressing salon…
The motherboard section doesn’t take up the whole site – on the contrary, we’ll come back later to the other sections that make up the site. The area responsible for manufacturing the graphics cards was very compartmentalised… On the plan below, it’s part A, which deals with motherboards, that we visited. There are a total of 12 lines dedicated to motherboards.
More content to come in the next few days.
