Battery and bus manufacturer BYD has announced that it has created the world’s largest mass-produced face mask plant, which is running at full capacity and is able to produce five million masks and 300,000 bottles of disinfectant per day. The newly-built facility in one of BYD’s industrial parks in Shenzhen started production on 8 February, with hundreds of staff working both day and night shifts along with machines working around the clock.
The firm set up a task force which it says completed both the R&D and manufacturing process of mask production equipment within seven days, whereas on the market, it would normally take 15 to 30 days to fully manufacture a mask-producing machine. Mask production requires impeccably clean and sterile environments and equipment, for which BYD says its dust-free rooms, previously used for the assembly of smartphones, are particularly well-suited. During the Spring Festival period, the company was unable to obtain mask-making equipment rapidly enough, so it set about making its own machines. BYD can now make more than a dozen of these machines a day.
With the company making five to 10 new mask-producing machines on a daily basis, the number of masks produced by BYD is increasing at a rate of approximately 300,000 to 500,000 units per day. It currently has a total production capacity of five million masks per day, which is equivalent to a quarter of China’s entire production capacity in early February.
