Pick a place machines are operated by experts, require supply chain planning to ensure you have the right parts with the right specs, the boards have to be tested, you have to diagnose issues. You have to understand solder bath temperature profiles. You have to have solder baths (large precision controlled vats of molten metal). It’s a complex problem.

Hiring people to put batteries in phones and phones in boxes? Never done that specifically, but other assembly line stuff like that does not require much. Certainly not a multi year culture building process. I used to work for a company that built food gift boxes. When we staffed up for the holiday season, it took about 20 minutes to train new hires. We once added an entire line in a day to make a custom product. I’m not saying that the managers and workers didn’t work hard, but it was not particularly complex work. Most of the difficulty was in finding ways to reduce packing times by a few percentage points.

Put this way: your company have a week to build one of the above processes for 1500 phones a week, and they get a $1mm bonus if they succeed. Do you choose pick and place assembly or battery assembly.