Sapphire Corporate History

Sapphire Technology Ltd. was founded as private company in June 2001 by KD Au, first as video card reselling company for the European Market.

Over 3000 People are involved in the production of a video card from Sapphire, which is the biggest manufacturer and seller of ATI Video Cards with a capacity of up to 1.8 million units per month.

The ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified factory has always been the major manufacturer of ATI boards for most of the top ten tier 1 OEMs worldwide. With this background, the customers are guaranteed the best product quality and reliability.

The Factory

Sapphire's Factory is located in China, near the city of Dongguan. The distance to Hong Kong, where the corporate headquarters are, is about 100 km.

Dongguan, located between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, is the Chinese Mainland's leading centre for export processing in labour-intensive, light manufacturing industries.
In 2002, Dongguan was the Chinese Mainland's third leading exporting city ($44 billion trade in 2002) behind Shenzhen and Shanghai. Foreign investment has been an important driver of Dongguan's development, with the vast majority of Dongguan's industrial output supplied by foreign-invested firms. Dongguan factories produce an enormous range of goods and have made Dongguan one of the world's leading manufacturing centres.

The Factory has an area of about 250,000 m² which is used by 16 completely independant production lines. At the time of our visit additional lines were under construction to satisfy the increased demand from the market.

Component placement

The life of a video card starts with the empty PCB (printed circuit board). Sapphire does not manufacture these themselves, they are bought from an external contractor.

Next comes placement of the SMD (surface mount device) components. This is performed by a completely automated FUJI CP-732E placement machine, which takes the PCB design as input and places components from a selection of up to 140 different parts onto the PCB - at an amazing rate of 15 parts per second!





An X800 video card has about 850 components, so the first run, which is one side only takes about 1 minute. Now multiply that by two, because two cards are built together at the same time as you can see from the following pictures:



Two PCBs are joined together at the socket connector and will be cut into two video cards later during the production process.