Yesterday, Feb 10, 2020 was the first day select factories in China were allowed to resume production due to the coronavirus outbreak that started over the Lunar New Years holiday. Some workers have started trickling back to offices and production facilities but many factories and businesses remained closed.
As this situation relates to GCP, only a couple of our factory partners have been given the okay to restart production. From what we’ve been told, there are a number of elements keeping the rest of the factories from resuming production.
1) There remains nationwide travel restriction inside China. Some areas are more restricted than others which means many workers who went home for the Lunar New Year holidays are stuck there.
2) At the moment local Chinese governments are requiring all out of town workers to quarantine themselves. This means any worker who has been able to travel back to the production site from another town or province can not go back to work until the quarantine period is over.
3) In order to restart production, factories need to be granted permission by their local government. Without permission, they will not be able to resume production.
While the situation is still very serious, the Chinese government expects 160 million people will return to work between now and Feb. 18. In addition they are urging regions less hit by the outbreak to accelerate the resumption of production, according to a national televised conference held by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Further adding, it is “very urgent” to resume industrial production.
It’s important to note that all of GCP’s partner manufacturers are located in areas considered to be less impacted by the coronavirus. Our partners are following the necessary precautions to ensure the safety of their employees and continue to work with their local governments in order to restore production as soon as possible.
Given the fluidity of this situation we will continue to monitor the events inside China closely, and provide updates as we can. In the meantime, please contact us with any inventory concerns you might have. Part of the strength of GCP is our inventory network and we are committed to helping our customers fulfill any outages they might anticipate over the short term.
For further information, please contact: sales@gcpindustrial.com
Sincerely,
The GCP Team
