Sounds quite similar to the serial number format used on Apple products until recently. First 2 characters were the country / factory of manufacture, 3rd digit

Sounds quite similar to the serial number format used on Apple products until recently. First 2 characters were the country / factory of manufacture, 3rd digit was the year, 4th and 5th were the week. The next three were the machines actual unique serial number, and the final three were a model identifier. Seems to be pretty common to store this information in "plain text" in the serial number. I'm sure it has advantages over just giving every product a UUID and having a lookup in a database somewhere, perhaps in doing product recalls - you can specify a range of numbers that are affected?