I’m here at Dyson Singapore, getting a special tour of their global headquarters and their top-secret labs.
Can you smell the mint?
Okay. So, imagine this is urban sewage.
What you’re going to do is put the visor back up.
You’re not smelling it anymore.
Nope, I’m not.
This is the machine that started an empire.
What kind of products get tested in this room?
All Dyson products from our floor care to our hair care products.
And they’re giving us exclusive, 360-degree access
inside the inner workings of a multibillion-dollar tech company.
It might be one of the world’s most recognizable vacuum makers, raking in revenues of $8 billion in 2022,
but Dyson is also known for other homecare appliances such as bladeless fans,
air purifiers and hair care products.
Similar to many start-ups, Dyson had its beginnings in a humble coach house in Bath, United Kingdom.
It was here that inventor James Dyson developed his first, iconic vacuum cleaner,
creating more than 5,000 prototypes in the process.
Production began in 1993, and Dyson’s expanded rapidly, opening stores in Australia, Europe,
the United States and Asia.
Today, Dyson has technology campuses in the U.K., Malaysia and China,
but its global headquarters is in Singapore.
After nearly 30 years in the UK, the choice to move its head office to Singapore in 2019
wasn’t without controversy.
It seemed the company now saw the biggest opportunity for growth in Asia,
and as a vocal supporter of Brexit and one of the wealthiest people in the United Kingdom,
James Dyson was accused of hypocrisy.
What was it about Singapore then that made Dyson choose this location to be the global headquarters?
It comes down to building up of trust, between both Dyson and Singapore getting to know each other
but also the long-term view Singapore places on investments in new technology and
advanced manufacturing.
Hengky Wirawan leads the design and development of the Dyson Hyperdymium motor, which is used
in many of its products such as vacuum cleaners and fans.
Singapore is one of the few nations with the right talents and skills in the area that
is crucial, and as well as it being a global supply chain hub, which is essential requirement
for us to be able to make such a complicated, complex technology piece.
Over the years, we talked about being a British brand but actually
we have been very inspired by a lot of places in the world.
We’d like to see ourselves as a global technology brand.
We really are looking to personalize that experience for everyone around the world.
But also, really understand some of those cultures and diversities that will really
inspire us to create new ideas to solve problems that are very relevant to people in different countries.
Dyson’s mainly splitting its $3.4 billion global investment into three countries,
the U.K., the Philippines and Singapore.
Its Asian investment includes a $206 million technology campus in the Philippines, and
a giant battery plant in Singapore, which is due to open in 2025.
That’s the size of 53 basketball courts, so huge.
It’s a significant investment for us.
We want to make a battery cell to complement our power system, our motor and our advanced
algorithms, but to enable these products to
be lighter weight, be more efficient and have a longer life.
Our new battery factory allows Dyson to have a much longer-term view because they’re
supported by a very clear strategy from the government to allow us to make big investments,
with the confidence that they’re going to be supported.
My name is Steven. Today, I’m going to bring you on a tour of our RDD space:
research, design and development space.
Sounds good, lead the way.
This is the Acoustic Chamber.
It’s a semi-anechoic chamber.
So, what anechoic means is free from echo.
It’s semi-anechoic, meaning that the floor is still reflective.
This helps to provide a controlled environment for us to measure sound.
This is where we actually put the Dyson Air Purifier Big + Quiet to actually demonstrate
to you the acoustic engineering that we put in.
If you keep quiet, you won’t actually hear any other noise other than the wind sound.
Let’s hear it.
It’s already powered on at one.
It is already powered.
Justin helped develop the Dyson Zone, a wearable purifier cum headphones which had more than
500 prototypes created over 5 years.
In fact, the company has a secretive 3D printing lab just to churn out prototypes
which we are not allowed to film.
These printed models allow its engineers to test the different prototypes quickly,
including its hair care products.
We actually work on real hair.
And we actually obtained them from organizations that get this hair through ethical means and
proper compensation to all the donors.
Maybe you can pick up one of the hair tresses.
I’ll take this and demonstrate how we do the AirWrap curling performance.
This is an imaging rig.
Yes.
What it does is that it will take photos from different angles, and then we actually have
software to analyse how well the curl is, how the styling performance can be enhanced
further with each iteration of the prototype.
Engineers, we like numbers.
This is where we connect style, that seems to be very abstract, to numbers,
where we can actually compare and work with.
How do you see A.I. transforming or value-adding your industry?
AI has really been at the core of what we’ve been doing.
So, we started off with our motors, the algorithms inside the motors allowing the motor to spin
with a huge amount of accuracy very, very fast.
We’re looking into a lot of connectivity.
We think that our software team is going to really increase in size from over 600 up to
a thousand in the next few years, to really pivot Dyson into more of a software world.
And to ensure that every product is tested rigorously,
participants are invited to test them before the launch.
When a participant comes in, we do a video recording, and we also have an audio mic over there
that picks up audio in this room.
This mirror over here, this is a one-way mirror.
Because when the users are trying out the products, they don’t want to be bogged down
by so many eyes.
The company has about 14,000 employees worldwide in over 80 countries,
with 1,400 of them in Singapore alone.
Out of which, 600 are in engineering.
Kashyap is the Director of Upstream Robotics, and he leads a team of designers and engineers
across Singapore and the UK.
We just launched the Dyson VisNav.
He tells me that this tech took 7 years to develop, involving 750 engineers across the world.
The centre of gravity of robotics research today, sits more in the UK, and the centre
of gravity of delivery of robotics sits more in SEA, but we see that shifting.
We are building future robots that require new capabilities, great engineers and
very niche skillsets, teams that don’t exist today in this part of the world, that we need to build.
We’re doing the concepts, James and Jake are quite heavily involved.
They love to be able to influence a product, shape it.
Jake Dyson is James Dyson’s son.
He's the inventor of energy-efficient lights that are touted to last 60 years.
We were looking for over 2,000 engineers last year.
Robotics and software is the largest pool of people we’re trying to hire globally.
A lot of the products you’ve seen in the labs that are in the making, we need hundreds
of people to be able to deliver that.
So, I think this part of the world is well set-up to be able to help us ramp up to do
that delivery in the coming years.
But the company’s growth in the region has come under scrutiny.
In 2021, migrant workers employed by ATA, its biggest parts supplier, made allegations
of forced labor and dangerous working conditions in ATA’s Malaysian factories.
Dyson would later cut ties with ATA, which had been making parts for its vacuum cleaners
and air purifiers.
But while Dyson requires a huge labor force to support its global manufacturing supply chain,
production, particularly of its motors, is increasingly reliant on machines.
The motor itself is at the heart of a lot of our products.
We have more robots than humans.
In fact, we have 300 autonomous robots in the line to allow us to manufacture these
Gen 5 motors.
How many people are on the floor?
On average, there would be around two people when the lines are running, to manage the line.
Then the motors, once produced, will be shipped to a contract manufacturer around the globe,
to be fed into the product, whether it be the cordless vacuum, or the supersonic hairdryer.
Since 2012, we’ve produced 100 million motors combined between two manufacturing sites in
Singapore, and we have another manufacturing site in the Philippines.
We were able to achieve a very high-speed motor, over five times faster than a formula one car engine.
Speaking of cars – Dyson had plans to build an electric car in 2017, but the project was
shelved after two years and more than half a billion dollars later.
But a prototype of the car exists – and I had a chance to see it.
We’re now at Dyson’s global headquarters at St James Power Station, ready to take a look inside.
There’s a Dyson electric car here.
This is completely manufactured in-house.
All of the parts are done in-house.
It was quite challenging to make the decision to discontinue it.
The Dyson electric vehicle wasn’t really commercially viable compared to the competition.
When you want to pioneer and come up with new technologies and new products, you often
are face with hard decisions that maybe you have to stop products.
We’re accepting that sometimes we’re going to fail.
But there’s a silver lining – Dyson has identified other technologies which can be
spun out of the failed project, such as sensors, robotics, machine learning and importantly, batteries.
St James, a former coal-fired power station, opened in 1927 and was gazetted as a
national monument in 2009.
After 2 years of refurbishing, it was opened as Dyson’s global headquarters in 2022.
Over here, lunches are free for the employees.
All employees.
Basically, our chefs are constantly curating and cooking a wide variety of dishes for all of us.
There have been challenges that Dyson has faced in the last couple of years.
Because we’re in the game of innovation and new technology, we’re used to things
being a bit of a rollercoaster.
If we didn’t have issues, we wouldn’t be innovating enough.
I’ve been here for 22 years and every year it gets more challenging in terms of the technology.
So expect to see lots of new categories from Dyson with exciting technology and looking at
us to really redefine some of the traditional categories and new ways of doing things.