Photo Gallery: The World's 10 Largest Factories

The Size of a Small Town

It's easy to get lost in these factories. With an area of up to 10 million square meters, the world's largest production facilities are as big as a town. Machineseeker.com, the marketplace for used machinery has published a ranking of the 10 largest factories.

They are home to enormous production lines and at the same time the work and living space for up to 500,000 employees. The largest factories in the world have their own fire brigades, ports or hospitals. They function like real cities with their own road network and an inner city.

In the ranking of Machineseeker.com there are mainly technical companies, most of them from the automotive industry. Their highly automated production lines require a lot of space but are also extremely efficient. At the Hyundai plant in South Korea, on the fourth place in the ranking, 5,600 cars are produced every single day - one vehicle every 12 seconds.

The VW plant in Wolfsburg with its 6.5 million square meters ranks second . The factory's built-up hall area alone is as large as the entire Principality of Monaco. NASA's assembly centre, on the other hand, accommodates space rockets that transport space vehicles, astronauts and supplies into space. A rocket is 65 metres high - the height of a 16-storey high-rise!

Hall areas as large as Monaco

But you don't have to travel across the world to see large production sites. Because the world's largest factory is located in Germany. BASF in Ludwigshafen, the world's largest chemical site, employs about 39,000 people. Even manufacturers of huge missiles cannot compete with the traditional German plant, which was established in 1865 and is now 10 million square meters in size - the NASA and Boeing plants only rank seventh and tenth place respectively.

It is unlikely, however, that the industry will continue to outbid itself with ever larger factories. "The factory 4.0 must be able to react highly flexibly to current customer desires, prognosticates Thorsten Muschler, managing director of Machineseeker.com. "This requires smaller, more responsive production plants that are organized decentrally and, at best, localized directly at the point of consumption.

Machineseeker.com, the leading online marketplace for used machines, has put together a picture gallery of the huge factories for you. Have fun clicking through.

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