Stuff gets put together in Finland to form the final device they ship, even if the parts aren't made in Finland. I think a dictionary lookup for "assemble" might help if this explanation did not.
Well, assembly can mean that a pick and place machine is assembling individual capacitors onto a raw circuit board, or it can mean a teenager putting the battery in and putting the battery cover on before packaging it. That’s why “look it up in a dictionary” comments aren’t helpful. We aren’t confused about the word, we are confused what it means in this use because it can have a VERY broad definition.
Pick and place PCB assembly is very different from the final assembly of batteries in terms of who is capturing value and building a reasonable moat. Their sales angle is around European autonomy.
Low wage workers putting batteries in phones is not that, but PCB assembly is much closer to that.
I don't know anything but I thought it's the opposite of that? I thought pick-and-place machines are like fancier 3D printers, and they can be bought and copied anywhere sufficiently advanced, but low-wage assembly workers are organic AGIs that require multi year culture building and prompt engineering know-hows accumulation to be able to achieve and maintain even usable yield rates and cannot be spun up overnight, especially after a workplace was once torn down.
Or am I just spoiled by apparent local regional abundance of cheap roboticists?
Pick a place machines are operated by experts, require supply chain planning to ensure you have the right parts with the right specs, the boards have to be tested, you have to diagnose issues. You have to understand solder bath temperature profiles. You have to have solder baths (large precision controlled vats of molten metal). It’s a complex problem.
Hiring people to put batteries in phones and phones in boxes? Never done that specifically, but other assembly line stuff like that does not require much. Certainly not a multi year culture building process. I used to work for a company that built food gift boxes. When we staffed up for the holiday season, it took about 20 minutes to train new hires. We once added an entire line in a day to make a custom product. I’m not saying that the managers and workers didn’t work hard, but it was not particularly complex work. Most of the difficulty was in finding ways to reduce packing times by a few percentage points.
Put this way: your company have a week to build one of the above processes for 1500 phones a week, and they get a $1mm bonus if they succeed. Do you choose pick and place assembly or battery assembly.
Seems much more likely to me that the main board of the phone is assembled in China and the battery and the case, and perhaps the screen are added in Finland. But it would be nice to know for sure.
