Inside Samsung's Galaxy S5 Production Line

GUMI, Korea – In a five-story building in this central Korean industrial city, a young woman may be snapping together your brand-new Samsung Galaxy S5 right now. We took a small-group trip to Samsung's Galaxy S5 factory line to see how your phone is coming together.

About 120 miles south of Seoul, Gumi is a government-designated factory city that churns out electronics for export. Samsung's "smart city" complex makes some of the company's top smartphones, and it's flanked by similar factories for LG and other major Korean industrial firms. If your phone says "Made in Korea," it probably comes from Gumi.

The Galaxy S5 parts come shipped in from around the world; what happens in Gumi is primarily assembly, testing, and packaging. Robots that look like giant plotters spit chips and diodes from long strips of plastic onto circuit boards, with some components as tiny as two tenths of a millimeter. Once they're mostly assembled, they're handed over to humans to remove some little bits of tape, press some boards together, snap on the backs, test voice quality and put the S5s into their boxes for shipping. Robotic trucks trundle along, pick up the boxes, read barcodes, and bring them to the shipping floor. Unlike some other phone companies, Samsung does almost all of its manufacturing in-house rather than outsourcing to big Chinese firms like Foxconn.

One of the most striking aspects of the line was how almost all the workers I saw were young women. Checking out the factory roster, it looked like the assemblers were almost entirely women, while the "repair" staff were almost entirely men. A Samsung rep later told me that the Gumi assembly job is considered a solid position for girls to take out of high school. Some quit when they get married; others go to an extension university right on the Samsung campus and get degrees.

I've been to other mobile phone factory lines in China, and – big surprise – Samsung's Korean facilities are newer, brighter, physically smaller, and more tightly focused. Using a "cell system" where four staffers work in tandem rather than a traditional assembly line, the Gumi factory can churn out tens of thousands of phones a day, Samsung said.

Take a look at the slideshow below to see who might be assembling your Galaxy S5.