this is no semi conductor manufacturing dude, boards are designed by haier, semi conductors are shosen by haier, the most they will do is install the chips or print the mother board. Semis conductor manufacturing is totally different game than making PCs.
Back in the 80s I used to work for computer company in Karachi, they had a hardware service dept with 4 engineers who would repair, rebuild motherboards or any controller cards in a mainframe because in those days a motherboard will cost 6 months salary of an engineer. but saying this assembly line will bring technology to Pakistan is so naive.
Instead of arguing like silly and making yourself look like someone who has NO idea what they are discussing, how about you do your research? You are making your entire nation look like fools when you post crap like this, like a stubborn 14 year old child doesn't want to understand what someone is telling him.
Are you sure that main-boards are so simple to put together that you just connect them and put chips on them? Are you sure?
AS a manufacturer running an international ship, with ISO and ANSI compliance, you have to have a certain defect ratio and a level of engineering manufacturing (Japan thus far is the best at it, and then the US and South Korea, Israel and others). The engineering process has to be 5-Sigma or 6-Sigma (current standards), along with different industry standards that a manufacturer has to meet, including ANSI (American National Standards Institutes), EU's regulations for Europe and all. Otherwise, you can NEVER sell ONE laptop, or legally give it as a gift to these countries. These standards combined with engineering technology ensure you meet a country's standards, regulations and all. Otherwise you can't sell them to these countries.
For example, the US manufacturer's like Dell and Oracle, can't sell their US hardware and software overseas. The standards for overseas are different and even to sell these, every company requires a US government's approval.
What do you think was changed in Pakistani Vipers block 52 that everyone was making so much noise about in terms of the US has a "kill switch"???? These are modifications to a main-board by adding another piece of hardware circuit that can do X when used.
Just to give you two examples of how this builds an entire new industry and a labor base for Pakistan to build electronics, or get more manufacturing business to assemble, let me walk you through two processes. I don't have the time to walk you through the ENTIRE manufacturing process, although I easily can if i had two hours to write about it. But let's see how the QA and QC processes work.
When you "assemble" a laptop, there are DIFFERENT levels of QA / QC (Quality Assurance / Quality Check or Certification) that EACH laptop has to go through. Its pretty obvious the little experience you had in Pakistan was with 4 people trying to "fix" stuff. Not assemble. After laptops or electronics are assembled, there are TEAMS of people doing JUST QA and QC.
Quality Assurance is the process to ensure a device's components, frequencies (every chip runs its own frequency and code), processing functions and capabilities meet the ISO standards (international standards). Then, the other QA part is to ensue that the laptops designed for the Chinese or the American or the European market meet their technology base these countries have set forth (like I explained ANSI for the American market, Canadians use ANSI but also use their own, EU uses their own, Japan has her own standards, etc).
Once you pass the QA with everything (each machine goes through it and people verify all aspects of QA, meaning they KNOW how every single transistor, processor and circuit is supposed to work for each customer per the specifications).
Next step is QC: this is where laptops are actually RUN and different software programs are qualified on laptops in different markets. For example, the Windows you might install in India, doesn't have the code set for the US. The US windows are different than the European windows as the code base is different. This is true for EVERYTHING, MS Office, Software Drivers, Google, Photoshop, media applications, etc, etc. So ALL these have to be tested to make sure the processor and all other sub-chip systems understand the instructions that the software is giving to the processor and the laptop as a system can execute all the tasks correctly, as expected by every application. This is very complex by itself!!
When a new version of Windows comes out, companies like Dell sell those and their laptops will have a sticker on them saying "Certified for Windows XXX or Windows XYZ Compatible or Intel Core I8, etc". All these things take hundreds of millions of dollars for a technology manufacturer, to learn, setup labs and machinery and scientists and techs and then run the operation and meet these published requirements and goals.
You then have to test pretty much all high level programming languages like .Net, Java, C++, etc, etc and then verify that the processor's instruction processing capability, all these software codes, become native processor languages when they hit the processors like Assembly and stuff. So if your processor has 2 or 4 cores, one of the cores isn't working, due to which, when the application tells the processor to "show green color", it turns black and shuts off or shows Yellow color instead. You think this laptop would go to a customer? If a few thousands of these defected products went to customers, the business would have REALLY REALLY bad name out there and people would rather buy Dell or IBM, etc. Resulting in losing Billions and the brand gets destroyed.
Microsoft (JUST one example) spends 60% of its budget on QA-QC. The remainder 40% goes to salaries of ALL other employees from corporate down to the help desk, customer service, product coders R&D and all. You see how important QA-QC is? Just two processes. And it means that when you QA/QC anything, the people doing it, aren't just laymen, there is advance technology, electronics engineers, hardware and software engineers and ordinary technician involved. THUS, creating a labor force that can then go manufacture other things as the industry has been set.
If you don't understand something and how complex it may be, try not to just start silly posting to score political points.
Chinese company Lenovo just cut a deal with India to do the same thing in India that Hair is doing in Pakistan. The entire INDIA, their PM and all, went onto media and thanked the Chinese and highlighted this investment as "great help in turning India a giant electronic manufacturer). Here, even after explanation, I am dealing with a depressed political mind set that doesn't want to understand how critical this is for their country!!
This is the saddest thing I am seeing across this site site and probably across Pakistan. People are too busy trying to show the current government's work as shiit. In that process, you guys trying to make these silly, nonsense points, look like total fools and make your country look like a country where no one's educated to understand these business things. But you guys have no nationalism. You'd rather continue to do political point scoring than actually support the work being done!!! I don't even know how you take such a broken nation together. May be you guys are destined to fight among yourselves like the Indians say!!! Very sad behavior indeed.
Here is a link to ANSI site (just so you can see how many standards are there and each standards version has over thousands of pages that the manufacturer is supposed to understand, follow and then produce products for American market, same is the case for other countries.
ANSI-American National Standards Institute
American National Standards Institute - ANSI Standards Store
Essentially, they are putting things together in a box and seeing if it turns on like it is supposed to. Had the news been about setting up a semiconductor manufacturing plant or one that makes digital signal processors. I might have given it some merit.
Ever seen an assembly line for manufacturing electronics equipment? Its QA, QC process? Signal processing, conversion, etc? This is a highly complex and scientific process and requires all level of people, from ordinary techs to highly qualified electronic engineers, hardware engineer, and software engineers, with highly specialized defect control trained labor. If you send out 1000 laptops without using the above and those things fail....Hair would lose stock prices over bad manufacturing and would take a hit across the globe, worth hundreds of millions.
A company's brand is their life. The brand's name gets bad press......the company is done as people don't buy from them.
Pakistan will soon be manufacturing mobile phones internally. The setup to manufacture the laptops was the step 1 (to put in the needed infrastructure in place). Then the cell phone technology will come as the agreement is near finalization with TOT on certain phone and tablet products from China. A few years from today, when these assembly lines are working, sky's the limit as to who you go get business from, or what you could make internally.