TOKYO, March 28, 2020—It’s widely known that China can do anything it targets at speeds multiple times faster than its western rival countries and dominates the world marketplace. Now China could do just that and become the first and largest manufacturer of products in global efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic while the United States and other developed countries are desperate at containment.
China already is the world’s largest manufacturers of five varieties of medical personal protective equipment such as facial masks, garments, gloves and goggles, supplying 43 percent of world imports, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The coronavirus outbreak in China’s industrial city of Wuhan sparked fears that Chinese PPE exports would sharply decline but ‘not as badly as feared,’ it said.
China expanded its capacity sharply after the Wuhan coronavirus breakout. New companies sprang up as manufacturers of existing industries converted their assembly lines to make PPE products, the shift that they did in a matter of a month, like building the hospital for the infected in Wuhan in less than a month. EV carmaker BYD could make 5 million masks and 300,000 bottles of disinfectants a day, the New York Times reported March 27. Taiwan electronic maker and iPhone manufacturer in China, Foxconn, is making 2 million masks a day, NYT said.
No, the manufacturing shift is not a surprise at all. China did it in the manufacture of electrical and electronic products in the 1980s by counterfeiting piracy and look-alike products of SONY, Panasonic, Toshiba and other Japanese companies’ portable radios, television sets, and white goods the Japanese were making at their Chinese factories. Then in the 1990s and on, China began manufacturing high-speed trains that look similar to Japan Rail’s Shinkansen bullet train, and in the 2020s, it shifted gear further to more high-tech products including cars, smart phones, and medical devices.
The NYT said Mr. Cody Zhang’s robot start-up in Shenzhen called Youlbot developed an antivirus robot ‘over a frenzied two weeks.’ Not a surprise given the Chinese built the Wuhan hospital in a month. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/business/china-coronavirus-masks-tests.html?action=click&module=moreIn&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer&contentCollection=Business)
Speed is China’s forte, and not only redoubling PPE products, China is performing clinical tries of various anti-CORVID-19 pharmaceuticals. Who knows that a Chinese pharma could be the first to claim completing clinical trials by next year!
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