Shanghai factories gradually restart amid COVID- 19 wave
▶ Full recovery hindered by logistics issues
Factories in Shanghai ranging from car firms to heavy industrial enterprises have begun to resume production over the past week, as the city is mounting a broad work resumption campaign for the manufacturing sector while ensuring epidemic controls, after authorities pressed the pause button on the bustling metropolis in late March.
But a full recovery of the sector is constrained by factors including different local anti- epidemic measures, shortages of resources and snarled logistics. Many companies’ work resumption rate is still below or near 50 percent, according to industry insiders and experts on Sunday.
An employee at the Shanghai Boiler Works Co told the Global Times on Sunday that after the whitelist was issued, hundreds of employees applied to return to work, but local authorities only let about 80 people resume work, mostly assembly line workers.
These people, plus about 800 workers who have been working in the plant in a closed- loop style in recent weeks, meaning the facility’s work resumption rate is about 45 percent.
The industrial park of Sany Heavy Machinery in Shanghai’s Lingang region has resumed production, but the resumption rate is only about 20 percent, gmw. cn reported on Thursday.
Zhang Xiang, a research fellow at the Research Center of Automobile Industry Innovation under the North China University of Technology, said there are still three major obstacles that hinder the recovery of production in the Yangtze River Delta region, which includes Shanghai: a lack of resources, logistics blockages and workers’ inability to leave their homes because of COVID- 19.
“Resources and personnel flows are restricted by different local governments’ policies, and have to meet certain requirements to reach their destinations, which greatly hinders the resumption of production,” Zhang said.
The Shanghai boiler plant employee also said that many workers are still confined to their neighborhoods, and traffic doesn’t flow freely among different districts, meaning that workers who live far from the factory won’t be able to travel to the plant.
But he stressed that the company has given a lot of support to employees, such as arranging hundreds of camp beds for on- site workers and handing food packages to employees.
A small- scale Shanghai- based vehicle supplier told the Global Times that snarled logistics channels are a major problem weighing on work resumption.
“Many key materials are not able to enter or leave Shanghai. The logistics companies we used to cooperate with have suspended operation,” a person from the company said.
Chen Jia, a research fellow with the International Monetary Institute of the Renmin University of China, said that the work resumption of the first batch of whitelist companies in Shanghai is advancing smoothly, but problems still need to be addressed in the logistics sector.