Xiaomi's Dark Factory

In 2020, 74% of Xiaomi phones were designed and built by contract manufacturers. In 2024, Xiaomi opened a factory in Beijing. Robots do almost all of the work there, 24 hours a day, and it can produce a flagship phone about every three seconds. The factory is in Changping, in northern Beijing. It cost 2.4 billion yuan (about $330 million) and can produce 10 million folding and flagship phones per year. Xiaomi gained experience with the smaller pilot factory in Beijing that it opened in 2020. When a People's Daily reporter visited that factory, the production hall was dark. No human workers were bent over assembly lines. Transport robots roamed the floor, their indicator lights blinked, and an engineer watched over the operation on a tablet. The pilot factory fit screens into frames with a gap about the width of a human hair. According to Lei Jun, Xiaomi's founder, about a hundred engineers and workers were needed to run the whole pilot factory. The new factory has ten times the output capacity of that factory. Xiaomi says it developed 96.8% of the new factory's equipment, and all the software, itself. The company wants to become what its vice president, Yan Kesheng, calls "the manufacturer of manufacturing": the company that builds the machines other factories run. Compare that with the United States. In April 2025 Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, said "the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones" would come to the United States and be automated. That is a plan for the future. Xiaomi's version has been running in Beijing since 2024. China's manufacturing prowess relied on cheap labor. But things are changing across the country. Last year, China installed 354,000 industrial robots. That was 59% of the total number installed worldwide, and about nine times the number installed in the United States. Over half of China's new robots were made by Chinese companies. While Washington talks about bringing phone assembly home and automating it, China is already automating, and increasingly with Chinese-made robots.