Inside Hisense’s Atlantis factory: 30 years of building with purpose
Hisense invited media into the Atlantis facility as it marks 30 years in South Africa, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how its televisions and refrigerators are manufactured locally.
What stood out during the visit, however, was less about the products themselves and more about what has been built around them.
You can see the investment in people
The factory is big, busy and highly technical. Televisions move through production lines, refrigerators are assembled and tested, and quality checks happen throughout the process. The facility can produce up to one million televisions and 500,000 refrigerators a year.
But alongside the machinery are reminders of the people who have made the operation possible.
Long-serving employees are recognised throughout the facility, with staff members, teams and leaders acknowledged for their contributions. Hisense directly employs more than 1,000 people at the Atlantis plant, many from Atlantis and surrounding communities.
Some have been there long enough to see their understanding of the work completely change.
One employee explained that when he first started working at the factory, he simply saw a refrigerator as something that kept food cold. Now, when he looks at one, he sees the individual components, technology and engineering that make it work.
That stuck with me because it captures something that can get lost when we talk about manufacturing in terms of investment figures and production capacity. A job can also be a form of education.
When a factory creates more than jobs
That education is reflected in the career progression of some employees.
Hugh Stephens joined Hisense in 2013 and worked his way from the production line into a mainboard repair technician role. Marlon Jacob started as a general worker with no refrigeration background and is now a team leader in the refrigeration department.
During the tour, we also heard about employees who have taken the technical and repair skills they developed at Hisense and used them to start their own businesses.
That is a more interesting measure of localisation than simply counting how many products are manufactured locally. It means skills are leaving the factory with people and creating opportunities elsewhere.
Hisense has formalised that approach through a skills-transfer programme that pairs Chinese engineers and technicians with local employees, with the aim of enabling South African staff to eventually run departments independently.
The company has also invested in a year-long, fully funded learnership for unemployed South Africans aged 18 to 28. The first cohort of 100 learners has graduated, with another 120 now entering the programme.
What happens when a corporation cares
It would be easy for the 30th anniversary to become a story about numbers: millions of televisions and refrigerators produced, thousands of jobs created and a R350m investment into the Atlantis facility in 2013.
Those numbers matter. But after walking through the factory, they don't feel like the whole story.
The investment is visible beyond the production floor too. Hisense's Hands on the Future programme, for example, has seen the company provide football kits, equipment and coaching to children in under-resourced communities across Cape Town, while school visits to the factory and the Tevolution Museum on Long Street introduce young people to manufacturing and the evolution of technology.
That same focus on creating opportunity is behind the Hisense-Northlink Technical Academy, which provides appliance-repair training and practical workplace experience.
Other initiatives are aimed at meeting more immediate needs, including Loads of Love, which has provided washing machines and tumble dryers to community centres, hospitals and animal shelters, and a R20,000 donation of sanitary products to period project.
What struck me was that these initiatives don't exist in isolation from the factory. They form part of a much bigger footprint – one that includes employment, skills, education and practical support in the communities around the business.
30 years, and what gets left behind
Since establishing its South African operation in 1996, Hisense has grown from its first overseas subsidiary into a significant manufacturing operation. The Atlantis plant has produced approximately 4.5 million televisions and 2.9 million refrigerators, with locally manufactured refrigerators exported to Europe since 2022.
But I left the factory thinking about that employee's comment about refrigerators. In the same way that he can no longer look at a fridge without seeing the technology and skill behind it, I don't think I'll look at Hisense – or technology companies more broadly – in quite the same way again.
A product can be easy to take for granted when you only see it on a shelf. Seeing the people, skills and investment behind it makes you think more carefully about the company that made it, and what it is doing beyond selling you a product.
There is a lot of discussion around ESG, localisation and corporate impact, but it matters to know what companies are actually doing. After 30 years in South Africa, Hisense's story is not only about the televisions and refrigerators it has produced, but about the opportunities and impact it has built around them.
