Opening Our Largest Factory to Date + Shipping News
Opening Our Largest Factory to Date + Shipping News

In keeping with our promise to always maintain open and honest communication with our customers, we wanted to share some big news related to our production capacity, as well as provide some information that explains why some of our most recent batches have been slightly behind our estimated 20-week delivery window.

Bobcat Adds its Fourth and Largest Factory to Date

Bobcat’s Production Capacity

Despite there being well documented issues with the global supply chain, we are happy to report that our production capacity has not slowed down. In fact, with the announcement of Batch 24, Bobcat has shipped a total of 150,731 hotspots since launching overseas sales 8 months ago. This means we've shipped almost 80k miners over the last 10 weeks alone.

We are also very excited to announce that we are adding a fourth factory to our production in November this year. This facility is not only the largest to date, but it is twice the size and has double the capacity of our next largest factory. Specifically, it adds 18 SMT lines and 10 assembly lines to our ever-growing production line.

While we have been able to navigate global supply chain issues and material shortages for much of this year, our scaling of our production lines will inevitably have some restraints created by these global shortages. This does not mean that we will have to slow manufacturing, but in the short term, our rate of production will be dictated by the global supply chain. Our long term commitment, however, does offer a promising production outlook in that we will be very well positioned to manage the demand and delivery needed to grow the ever-expanding network.

While we will not be able to immediately operate at our full production capacity given the aforementioned shortages, Bobcat’s manufacturing network has allowed us to vastly reduce the impact of this and we remain committed to our long term goals of optimization and scaling. We are optimistic that we will be able to take full advantage of our full production capacity in December when shortages are expected to be less severe.

Expanding Assembly Lines and SMT Lines

Issues with Logistics, Not Production

With upcoming international events like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas, the peak season for global logistics transportation is well on its way. This means that shipping volume is rapidly increasing in Hong Kong, China and the warehouses of all major shipping companies are consequently experiencing the strain of this increased demand.

 

National Holidays and Natural Disasters

As we announced earlier last month, a 7-day national holiday in October in China contributed to delays we’re experiencing now as both factories and shippers were greatly affected from the resulting limitations set on their labor force. Moreover, typhoon Kompasu hit Hong Kong 2 weeks ago and created the worst container shipping traffic jam that the region had seen in months.

The disruption to the global supply chain has of course greatly slowed overseas shipping and there continues to be a large backlog of goods in the warehouses of all major express couriers (e.g., DHL, UPS, FedEx) that are awaiting to be shipped. At this time, all couriers have indicated that their handling time has now doubled and processing packages is taking as long as 14 days.

What’s Next

Miners will continue to leave our facilities, warehouses will start clearing out their backlog, and all express couriers are presently working on resolving the issues that have been a detriment to their delivery timelines. We will grow this network together and we’re invested in making sure that you all get mining as soon as possible.

We promise to continue providing these updates as soon as information related to production and shipping becomes available. As always, please follow us on Twitter and Discord for all the latest news and updates.

Batch Shipment Workflow Reminder:

  1. Every Tuesday, our freight forwarder picks up thousands of units from our factory

  2. The forwarding agent then sorts the orders, packs them into individual boxes, and generates shipment labels for all of them

  3. It's up to the agent when these packages are handed over to DHL/UPS

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