We visited the only OPPO smartphone factory in Southeast Asia that makes the Find X8 Pro

Note: This article was first published on 21st November 2024. Our full Oppo Find X8 Pro review is here.

Did you know that some phone brands make their highest-end smartphones just next door? We didn’t, until OPPO threw us deep into Indonesia to see its only Southeast Asian smartphone factory, OPPO Manufacturing Indonesia.

Located just two hours by car from its capital city’s air hub (Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Jakarta), the factory is the crucible of OPPO’s A-series, Find N foldables, Find X premium series and flagship-lite Reno series phones.

It is one of OPPO's eight phone manufacturing centres (the others are in China, India, Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), making it the only Southeast Asian manufacturing hub for the Chinese phone brand.

Interestingly, phones assembled in OPPO Manufacturing Indonesia are only sold within the country's borders, not for export. That’s because the factory adheres to an Indonesian goods policy called TKDN, better known as the Domestic Component Level, which requires goods, products, and services sold in Indonesia to have a certain level of components sourced within the country.

Depending on the industry type, TKDN varies around the 40% mark. For phones, the requirement is 35%, and more than a third of a phone’s parts and assembly must be made in Indonesia. OPPO Manufacturing Indonesia exceeds that with a 36-37% TKDN, since its inception in 2022.

Components like batteries, adapters, cables, packaging, and packaging accessories (like user manuals) are all sourced and produced within the Indonesian archipelago, and the in-house assembly (from raw materials to packaging and distribution) happen within the 100,000 sqm² compound.

We were given a guided tour by Jefry Firman de Hann, the Director of the centre, who took us through the smart manufacturing process of assembly, testing, packing, as well as a separate look at its “ageing” process (the fun part of any factory visit, lab testing).

According to Jefry, the factory is capable of a five-day turnover rate, in which raw materials come in and are left in consumer hands as smartphones in five days. 

Much of the assembly process is assisted by AI, with more than 1,000 factory employees who piece together phones in a linear “one-piece flow” system. Each employee in each assembly line fills in the phone with a component, before reaching several machine checkpoints with AI-based vision intelligence to verify the parts are all in the right place. A finished phone makes it to the packaging area, assuming it wasn’t randomly selected for lab testing.

Jefry said that this method means the factory sees, on average, one to two million OPPO handsets made a month. All for Indonesian use, including its Find X8 Pro flagship series handsets.

To ensure that employees constantly have chances to upskill, OPPO Manufacturing Indonesia also goes to great lengths to identify and train its workers with the latest techniques, enabling them to work more efficiently and climb the ranks. The company also accepts internships from local Indonesian universities to give younger blood a fresh start in a multinational corporation. 

We also saw what an average OPPO phone goes through during its rigorous lab tests. One is a unique “darkroom” test in which the phone stays inside a metal prison for three days to check its network and signal strength. The drop tests (10cm) involve dropping the phone on its front glass, rear, and all four sides, on top of a 30-minute-long water submersion test to verify the phone’s IP ratings. 

Other tests didn’t make for good footage, but were even more intense than what people can usually withstand. One is the extreme temperature test, where OPPO phones are locked into temperature-controlled chambers up to 60°C. The dust resistance testing was already in action when we arrived, and we were denied entry since it was impossible to walk out unscathed. A separate rolling test throws four phones into a cylinder more menacing than your washing machine, putting the phones through 150 cycles of not-so-gentle spins.

The factory visit highlighted how serious OPPO is about restarting its global ambitions for its premium Find X range. The phone brand considers Southeast Asia a core market now, next to new markets like Brazil and Argentina. Right now, 60% of OPPO’s total smartphone volume are overseas shipments, and the company is looking to grow past its fourth-place position in global phone shipments.

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