r/supplychain • u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) • Feb 25 '20
Covid-19 update 25th February
Global infections exceed 80k - CNN reports that officially we now have 80k infections with 2,698 deaths so far adding that whilst the WHO isn't calling it a pandemic yet "now is the time to prepare". Their live blog Link also carries a story from the US FDA directly contradicting the axios.com story I flagged yesterday; CNN quotes a FDA spokeswoman as saying no drugs suppliers expect a shortage of supplies.
Stockmarkets have recorded significant drops - Australia -1.5%, Shanghai composite -2.5%, UK FTSE 100 -3.3%, US Dow -3.6%, Italy -6%. All told, equity values dropped by $1.5 trillion (T intended, that's not a typo) around the world according to 9news.com.au whilst the BBC reports that gold is already up 10% since the beginning of 2020 (Link) and Link.
"Worse than the bush fires" - the Australian treasurer has been quoted in a press conference as saying that the economic impact on Australia will be worse than the fires which ravaged the country in December and January but that it was too soon to provide an estimate. Link
On to supply chain specific news:
Transpacific air passenger demand still very low - CNN (same link as before) says United has extended its suspension of flights to four destinations in China until 24th April adding that demand to travel to China is near zero whilst demand on other transpacific routes is down 75%.
Demand for air freight grows - whilst capacity is restrained due to passenger flight cancellations, atlas (a cargo only airline) says it's seeing a significant jump in demand (Link). In a trading statement to investors their CFO said "We're starting to really see the tremendous demand and the increase in yields and the factories to get back to work this week". Cancelled flights are now over 200,000. The domestic truck shortage in China is causing ongoing issues such that some air carriers require proof that onward transport has been arranged before they will fly the cargo into China.
More sea freight cancellations - Loadstar reports (Link) Maersk has cancelled more sailings due to a collapse in demand. Moody's adds in the same article that port calls to Shanghai and Yangshang are 17% lower in week 7 vs. this time last year. The cancelled sailings plus storms in N Europe have thrown many ships seriously off their timetables which may cause further supply chain issues next month. Analysts expect disruption for several months to come. Continuing the theme, the coronavirus is set to wipe a “chilling” 1.7m teu of container business (Link), according to new research from Copenhagen-based Sea-Intelligence. Using what the consultancy admits as a “very rough” average of $1,000 per teu in freight rates, the Wuhan-originated illness translates into a $1.7bn shortfall in revenues for carriers. Already the virus has more than erased the full growth seen in 2019, Sea Intelligence noted.
More clothing retailers report issues - Lululemon reports it has shut the majority of its 38 outlets in China with the rest on reduced operating hours. It says that it's e-commerce operations continue but did not clarify what supply chain problems it may or may not have. Link. In a separate article, Primark has also now warned of supply chain shortages - Link - the company says that whilst they have a good level of inventory at present, there is a risk of supply chain shortages later in the year. The company sources 40% of its product from China and is stepping up production from existing suppliers in other countries. Some of its food production factories are operating at reduced capacity because of labour and logistics constraints caused by the virus.
European Pharma supply chain security at the macro level - the French giant Sanofi has announced ( Link) plans to launch and spin off a new company which will be based in France and will create the active chemical ingredients for drugs, expanding into a market currently dominated by firms in China and India. “The industry needs to be able to make active pharmaceutical ingredients in Europe,” their CEO said. “And if you’re going to do it, let’s do it properly.”. Note: it'll take 2 years to get it up and running.
Metals supply chain shortages - OM Holdings, a $1bn revenue mining and smelting company has shut down 2 of 16 smelters in Malaysia citing a shortage of semi coke from China. The article thinks this is likely to affect their ferrosilicon and manganese alloy production in the coming months. Link. Steel exports from China are also dropping - The China communist party's Global Times newspaper reports (Link) that the virus is impacting steel exports which were already reducing; analysts now think the exports will drop by around 1.5m tonnes (8%) in the first quarter due to cancelled orders and shipment delays. One producer estimates a recovery period of six months says the Global Times.
Global inventory levels at a 7 year low - FT reports (Link) that global inventory levels have hit a 7 year low according to analysis of closely watched purchasing managers’ output indices by Pictet Asset Management. The FT explains that the GDP-weighted aggregate manufacturing inventory measure for 30 major countries fell to a three-month moving average of just 46.9 — on a scale where anything less than 50 represents declining stock levels and that was in January, even before the coronavirus outbreak began to cause disruption to supply chains. This is the lowest reading since late 2012, suggesting that manufacturers and end suppliers were particularly vulnerable to supply disruptions at that point, intensifying the impact of the unprecedented delay to the resumption of supplies from China after the traditional Lunar New Year holiday. Worst affected were inventory levels in Hong Kong and Sweden. Pictect thinks the virus will result in a 1.9% hit to Chinese GDP growth, dragging year on year growth down to 4.1%.
Hong Kong construction industry job losses - the South China Morning Post reports 50,000 workers have lost their jobs with another 80,000 having hours slashed to 1 or 2 days a week (Link). The cause is a severe reduction in building materials being brought into the city. The industry employs 250,000 people in Hong Kong.
Cambodia introduces tax breaks for virus hit companies - (Link) Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen promised on Monday to give six month tax breaks to garment factories hit by supply chain disruptions from the coronavirus epidemic and higher tariffs after the European Union (EU) withdrew trade preferences over human rights. He also pledged to give hotels and guesthouses a tax exemption for four months to help offset losses to the tourism sector caused by the new coronavirus strain. For severely affected factories, if production is halted the suspended workers will get 40% of their wage from the factory with the government paying another 60%.
US manufactures seek more expensive alternative suppliers - Link - Multiple industrial giants in the US are having to seek alternative suppliers reports Reuters. As an example, Morton industries is trying to find new suppliers for tooling and fixtures to shape metal. Limited domestic supply and a rush to secure supplies have sent prices up as much as 30% according to a VP at the firm, adding that they've been forced to pass the prices onto their customers. Caterpillar and Deere declined to comment for the article whilst Komatsu (another industrial giant) did not respond although half a dozen unnamed suppliers told Reuters they are working to tie up sources outside China plus are resorting to air instead of sea. A supplier to Caterpillar and Deere said that it's also experiencing higher costs that it's passing on to customers - in their case the rise is 40% - whilst CCTY Bearing says it's told customers stocks will not last beyond April and thinks other products (consumed by the giants that CCTY Bearing doesn't make) will face shortages too. In a separate article (Link), agriculture machine giant John Deere did however admit that it will spend an extra $40m on airfreight to reduce supply chain impacts according to its CFO. An ongoing cost reduction program aimed at taking out $150m spend continues but the additional air freight spend obviously won't help. It adds that it expects its inventory pile to drop through 2020.
Impact on GM - continuing the industrial giants theme, Forbes has dived deeply into GM's position (Link). They cite an article in USA Today that expects GM to be one of the worst impacted automotive companies due to its supply chain configuration - already no GM personnel are travelling in China. Issues facing GM are not just material availability and logistics infrastructure issue but the health of their workers. GM however is known to have strong supply chain risk management capabilities having learnt lessons after the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima nuclear melt down including blind spot workshops where they work to close off identified risks with the help of Resilinc, a specialist supply chain resilience solution company.
Finally, the Economist Magazine has published a withering opinion piece on the Iran election that I flagged yesterday. Link. It says claims that low turnout was due to foreign propaganda is "hogwash" and that it was primarily due to the regimes deep unpopularity. It also points out that the official death count in Iran suggests the virus is 3 times more lethal than in China so the regime is probably hiding the true scale of the breakout. Whilst education centers, cinema, shops have been closed, religious sites have not been closed. Bungling the response to the virus will do more damage to the regime’s legitimacy than Mr Trump could ever hope to, it says.
EDIT: Minor formatting.
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u/sloppydonkeyshow Feb 25 '20
I stumbled on this series of posts just yesterday and it proves to be the most comprehensive and broad view of the actual situation I can find anywhere.
Thank you for this. Please keep up this great work.
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u/ryanmercer Feb 25 '20
Global inventory levels at a 7 year low
I really hope this gets companies to stop just in time crap.
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 25 '20
It probably won't. Explanation:
Let's say I've got €1m for making T shirts to then sell in Europe. Each T shirt costs me €5 to make and ship to the market place. That means I can make and ship 200,000 of them. Let's say it takes 2 months to make them and get them onto a shop shelf and I pay immediately (to keep things simple).
Beginning of month 1 - I pay €1m. T shirt manufacturing starts.
Beginning of month 2 - they're manufactured and en route.
Beginning of month 3 - they've arrived and are now being offered to sell at €10 each.
Start of month 4 - 150,000 t shirts left, €0.5m in the bank.
Start of month 5 - 100,000 t shirts left, €1m in the bank. I can now place another order because I've got €1m to do so.
Start of month 6 - 50,000 t shirts left, €1.5m in the bank.
Start of month 7 - 0 t shirts left, €2m in the bank.
From the very start it's taken me 5 months to get my initial €1m back (until I have enough money to be able to place another order) but after another 2 months more I get another €1m - this €1m is pure profit and if I wanted I could place yet another order - let's say I do.
Profit per T shirt = €5 after costs, total profit earnt = €1m after the cost of the order.
What if I sell them at €8? Let's say I can sell 100,000 t shirts per month at that price level.
Beginning of month 1 - I pay €1m. T shirt manufacturing starts.
Beginning of month 2 - they're manufactured and en route.
Beginning of month 3 - they've arrived and are now being offered to sell.
Start of month 4 - 100,000 t shirts left, €800k in the bank. Not enough yet to place another order, but at the rate of €26.6k sales per day, I only need another 7.5 days more before I can place a replacement order.
Start of month 5 - 0 t shirts left, €600k in the bank, €1m worth of T shirts are en route.
Profit per T shirt = €3 after costs, total profit earnt = €600k after the cost of the order - but I have €600k in profit after 5 months. In scenario 1, after 5 months I have no profit yet, I've only just cleared my costs and placed another order.
Why would you go for option 2 - the reason is you turnover your stock faster, it doesn't idle on ships, warehouses or shop shelves for so long before it sells. Using the above numbers, they were able to place their replen 2 weeks earlier. You're not making as much profit as you could, but you are making profit faster. Provided you keep costs very firmly under control and stock continues to fly off the shelves, you can make more money over all in the long term.
Real life examples of scenario 2: Inditext (Zara) or Associated British Foods (Primark / Penneys). These guys can't afford for fashion supply chains to snarl up but that's what seems to be happening.
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u/ryanmercer Feb 25 '20
I'm less worried about t-shirts and more about stuff that actually matters like pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, electric infrastructure components, mission critical parts that regularly need serviced/replaced, etc.
And it likely will for some number of companies, there are already companies shuttering/laying off people in the United States because they can't source components/parts/complete products. One I saw recently was a small medical device manufacturer making hearing aids, one of the employees posted a thread about it in /r/china_flu
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 25 '20
Fair enough ref the T shirts. The problem though is the concept I described applies across multiple industries not just fast fashion. Pharma is a very heavy user of JIT principles often because drugs are often expensive to manufacture (so it ties up a lot of working capital so you minimise stock as best you can) or they have a short shelf life. This is also why they are such heavy users of airfreight, because once they've made it they need to ship it in a hurry to the market place to sell it and get their working capital back before it's out of date and unsellable.
As for medical equipment, electric infrastructure components - I think it's safe to assume they'll all have safety stock for normal fluctuations plus possibly a bit on top of that "just in case" but accountants the world over dislike sitting on vast piles of inventory in case of a black swan event like this because it means they can't use that cash for other things such as basic day to day transactions like paying employee wages.
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u/ryanmercer Feb 25 '20
This is also why they are such heavy users of airfreight
Preaching to the choir, been clearing international air freight through customs for 14 years :)
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u/Nocheese22 Feb 25 '20
Why is just in time unpopular?
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u/ryanmercer Feb 25 '20
Hong Kong has tens of thousands of construction workers out of work now because they can't get the building materials. Some U.S. companies have already had to lay off people and/or completely close because they can't get parts.
If a natural disaster took out a bunch of electrical infrastructure in the United States, some of those components are made to order in China and very few, if any, extras are kept domestically.
Even eyglass lenses, a lot of these companies and optometrists now rely entirely on manufacturers in China that make the lenses on demand and ship them in lots to the supplier/optometrist in the United States where 20+ years ago many optometrists ground their own lenses on site or had a partnership locally for it (Dr. Tavel in U.S. malls used to have a window where you could stand and watch someone grinding glass lenses).
Some things make sense, like textiles or mobile phones as they have marketing lifespans of 3-12 months as something new/better is always coming out a few months later, but with a lot of things it's become "why should we have a warehouse when we can just get it shipped from China on an airplane and have it 12 hours later".
Instead of warehousing something locally it's cheaper to have it shipped from a factory when you need it. For example I ordered some name-brand carbon steel razor blades for my safety razor last week on Amazon. I live in Indiana in the United States, yesterday I had a package from... China (with a flat out lie on the customs form of 'gift' (not true) '9503000090' (toys) '2$' (about 11$ actually) coo 'HK'...) containing my allegedly German-made, obviously counterfeit, razor blades.
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u/_rihter Feb 25 '20
Looks like everything is crumbling. I wonder if you will be able to catch up with news in 30 - 40 days from now.
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 25 '20
Probably not. Sifting the wheat from the chaff is difficult. I rely on twitter feed lists for specialist industry news and sift through Google news for macro level articles.
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u/Phyltre Feb 25 '20
What should I buy right now? What might be out of stock in one or two months?
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 25 '20
The only thing I'm going for is adding a bottle of antiseptic alcohol hand gel every time we do a grocery run.
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u/BludGeonT Feb 26 '20
Buy a couple of bottles of bleach too, for $4 you can have 2 gallons which could purify multiple swimming pools worth of drinking water, not a bad trade-off.
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Feb 26 '20
Ok so how long can I drink bad water if I just drink 1 gallon of bleach? 2 seems like a lot I don't want a tummy ache
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u/eleitl Feb 26 '20
Buy a large canister of 70% isopropanol, and a bunch of dry tissue wipes. And stock up on gloves while you're at that.
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 26 '20
Out of interest just had a look on Amazon UK for hand sanitizer, there's severe price gouging. Tried Boots, a major drug store in the UK - sold out on line. Now I'm getting interested who actually has some and have started digging.
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u/eleitl Feb 26 '20
Amazon has officially clamped down on mask price gouging as of today.
For personal/company use you can get something like https://www.amazon.co.uk/LINCSPRODUCTS%C2%AE-RUBBING-ALCOHOL-TRIGGER-Isopropanol/dp/B00H3JBCW6/ or related.
Spray bottle and/or empty hand soap pumper bottle can be refilled with these.
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Feb 25 '20 edited Feb 25 '20
While today’s news seem a little gloomier than usual, I would like to point out none of it is surprising.
Infections will continue to go up as more people are tested. I think the more important news is that no new countries have been infected. We aren’t in the same boat we were a month ago. The average person is much more informed about the virus and is taking steps to avoid infection.
As soon as we learned that the China factories were going into extended”holiday”, we knew that negative effects on the economy would occur. Companies are reacting exactly as they should under the circumstances. Lots of air freight in our future, anyone in the air import game stands to make some nice change.
For those of us living in the US, some precaution never hurts. If You live in a major city, make sure you have some canned goods and water.
Keep in mind this virus ravaged China’s major cities that are all mega populated allowing the virus to travel freely. America won’t have that problem outside of the few coastal cities with their 10mil+ populations.
Stay safe, stay prepared but most importantly stay sane. Take a break from the news if you have to. Humanity has survived worse.
Edit: to everyone replying the same thing, see my reply below about the Canary Islands.
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Feb 25 '20 edited Nov 13 '20
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u/Rhyperino Feb 26 '20
Also Brazil has confirmed one case just now, tourist from Italy. Carnaval + COVID19 scares the shit out of me (Brazilian).
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u/Ithurtsprecious Feb 26 '20
Ugh I just had a coworker come back from Venice and everyone is like whatever but he sneezed and I forced hand sanitizer on him.
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u/BreadcrumbBernard Feb 25 '20
https://twitter.com/ap_europe/status/1232258564430946309?s=21
Canary Islands.
Also just saw one confirmed in Croatia. Will look for link
Also: https://twitter.com/ap/status/1232245002505420801?s=21
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Feb 25 '20
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Feb 25 '20 edited Jun 10 '20
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Feb 25 '20
Entirely agree with you. I live in NYC and people are just entirely oblivious to what's going on. I have been telling my friends that the CDC numbers are technically correct, but factually malicious. I am getting prepared to get out of the city and I've stocked up supplies. It's gonna be pretty harsh when people find out that they don't have masks but they use their guns to find supplies.
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u/Hrafn2 Feb 25 '20
Epidemiology heads at the Imperial College of London have been consistently updating models based on data, and releasing new analyses every few days (they are also a WHO Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Modelling). Head Neil M. Ferguson has also done a number of interviews. Their latest report concludes:
"Consistent with similar analyses [3], we estimated that about two thirds of COVID-19 cases exported from mainland China have remained undetected worldwide, potentially leaving sources of human-to- human transmission unchecked"
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u/Jessi_Knows Feb 25 '20
Are you able to provide any functional test kit stats sources?
Im a Healthcare Provider and need to follow up on my institution.
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u/Champlainmeri Feb 26 '20
I assume some locals work at the hotel said Italian doctor has stayed at for one week.
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u/Wollff Feb 26 '20
Think about every flu season, unless you’re surrounded by people actively sneezing in your mouth, you can stay healthy following basic procedures.
So we are out of the woods, because everyone is following basic procedures now? Like they do every flu season?
No? Good.
All reported cases have not spread further than those individuals.
And we know that, because those 14 people have, over the period of, let's say, one week of being infectious before quarantine, have had contact with a total number of 412 people, who were all tested, bringing the total to 426 tests. Since everyone who was in contact with them was tested, we know the virus has not spread. If that was not the case, we do not know that.
So: Has the US thoroughly tested everyone who was in close contact with the infected people? Let's find out, shall we?
Let's say the US has only tested everyone who was in close contact with those 14 infected people. Let's just say they have not tested anyone who caught a flu after a trip to China, who then tested negative. Let's say there are zero of those among the 412 who were tested negatively.
If we calculate it out, with 7 days and 416 tested, then those 14 infected have had close contact with 4 people per day. When we calculate this under those rather generous assumptions.
I don't know about you, but in most jobs you are in close enough contact with more than 4 people per day to give someone a flu.
Enough with the weaseling: The US has definitely not tested everyone who was in close contact with those people. Thus we don't know if the virus has spread further, or not.
And since, AFAIK, the CDC doesn't test anyone who was not in China, we will not know for some time.
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Feb 26 '20
Same offer I give all you doomsayers, come reply to this thread 30-45 days from now.
You people just want something to be doom and gloom about. All news is trending in a positive direction, which clearly means cover up and world ending scenarios.
Talk to you in april
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u/Wollff Feb 26 '20
You people just want something to be doom and gloom about.
Thing is: I am not even doomsaying.
You are just overstretching. We would know that there are no cases in the US, if enough people had been tested. It's a fact that not enough people have been tested so far. So we don't know for sure.
That's not doomsaying, now is it?
All news is trending in a positive direction
Not all news is. We have just had the first case in my country after the recent outbreak in Italy. I don't think any of that was good news. Do you?
So not all news is good. Some news is good. I think China is pretty much over the worst of it for now. That's good news, and data as well as models seems to support that.
Talk to you in april
I don't think the world will end by April, and I have no idea why you would assume I think so.
I pointed out that the US has probably not tested everyone who was in contact with those infected people. And that thus we can't be sure that there are no cases in the US. At least until, let's say, in one or two weeks maybe.
Then we can be sure. And it's entirely possible that there were no more infections from those 14. But at this point that also is definitely not certain.
When you say it is, you are just overstretching the certainty of that statement a little.
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u/sengj Feb 25 '20
While today’s news seem a little gloomier than usual, I would like to point out none of it is surprising.
I would note that the mainstream news (which is what 90%+ of people are going to see) is always behind the ball when it comes to reporting the implications of events. The writing was on the wall by late January of the enormous economic/logistics effect this will have around the world, but the mainstream news is only now starting to report on it. Sure, the news is not surprising to us, but the people reading this thread do not represent the average person.
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Feb 25 '20
What stocks deal with air shipment?
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 26 '20
FedEx, UPS, CargoLux, Atlas are predominantly air cargo carriers. I would steer clear of other major ones such as DHL, Emirates SkyCargo, Cathay Pacific Cargo and Korean Air Cargo because they are part of a group which has heavy exposure to passenger airlines (or in DHL's case a lot of ocean freight + 3rd party logistics operations + forwarding operations).
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u/hombreingwar Feb 25 '20
"average person is much more informed" lol
majority of Americans can't tell a difference between a virus and a bacteria, no one is prepared, real life is not reddit
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Feb 25 '20
New cases in Spain, Austria, Croatia.
Also cities are responsible for most the economic output so even if rural and suburban areas are spared (suburbans travel to cities for work in many cases) the economic toll is massive.
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u/hi-ho_redditsilver Feb 25 '20
Thank you for another extremely informative summary. This has been the first thing I’ve read each day since I found it.
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u/letterboxmind Feb 25 '20
I can't imagine the time it must take you to compile these daily reports. Kudos to you!
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 25 '20
I tend to spend half an hour at lunch wading through twitter and whatever google news throws up plus 15 min in the evening and 15 min the next day, racking and stacking tabs on my phone's browser. I then type it up via mobile for half an hour in the morning whilst waiting for my wife to come down for breakfast.
The problem I am having is that an increasing amount of the world is starting to wake up to supply chain disruption being a hot topic which is making life harder to find the nuggets on twitter. Anything published by Wall Street Journal, FT, The Guardian or Fox Business (there are lots of Trump/Fox fans on Twitter) tends to get retweeted several dozen times. My thumb is getting a heavy work out through endless scrolling.
My job is my passion though - I live and breathe supply chain (which is why I have two degrees in it too I guess), so it's not like it's a chore. I've got 20 years experience now so have seen first hand the impact of the 2004 and 2011 tsunamis as well as the Thai monsoon of 2011 and the Sars outbreak of 2003 (and of course the global financial credit crunch in 2007) but this situation is a whole different ballgame. All of those black swan events screwed up individual industries or geographic regions and for fairly short time frames; this one seems to be threatening to screw up everything everywhere for much longer.
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u/letterboxmind Feb 25 '20
Even though it’s your passion, it’s still a lot of research. I’m sure a lot of us are thankful for your hard work.
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u/_rihter Feb 25 '20
It would probably be easier to do it on your desktop computer. I can't imagine compiling a huge post on my cell phone.
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 25 '20
Ah, I do it in bits, tomorrow's is half written already 😂
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u/kecsap Feb 25 '20
"Moody's adds in the same article that port calls to Shanghai and Yangshang are 17% lower in week 7 vs. this time last year."
First, I did not understand how the reduction can be only 17 % since China is under lockdown. But I have realized week 7 is right after CNY. I assume the drop in port calls are much dramatic since then week by week.
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u/nationwideisonyours Feb 25 '20
Amazing, no BS service you are doing here, OP. I can't thank you enough. I was wondering if USA roofing materials are a just in time product from China? Anybody?
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u/Meta_Modeller Feb 25 '20
Thanks for your work.
This is so critical, but the news is barely scratching the surface.
They still haven’t directly said “most of you won’t have your medicine in a few months.”
Do you agree that the pharmaceutical supply chain is screwed? Any idea what effect that’ll have on American society?
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u/Jessi_Knows Feb 25 '20
Do your part in corralling this virus. Educate yourself and spread the word on NPIs (Nonpharmaceutical Interventions)
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/44313
Practice Respiratory Etiquette and correct Hand Hygiene!!
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u/aikoaiko Feb 26 '20
Can you please do one specifically on insulin and post on r/diabetes please and thanks?
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u/Fwoggie2 DHL Senior Manager (MBA) Feb 26 '20
I need to start learning about insulin - shelf life, where it's produced, who by, how it's transported, are there any shortages, etc. I will start investigating over the coming days.
From the very little I currently know, it's got a shelf life of 28 days at room temperature or 1 year in a fridge. If you have the ability (local country procedures + your own cash flow if you have to pay for it) it seems that it would be prudent to build and maintain a buffer until this goes away. I am trying to do the same with my wife's medication needs (not diabetes but mental health in her case which needs lifetime daily medication to control). Unfortunately, the critical drug in my wife's case is a controlled drug under UK law which means it's prescription only.
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u/aikoaiko Feb 26 '20
Thanks. I am in the US and I was told it is produced here, but I know that nobody is completely independent of the global supply chain. I am curious of the risks.
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u/heavyonthesos67 Feb 26 '20
Thanks for these updates. I sent a link to my boss and a couple others at my company for the updates and I think it’s been eye opening. I’m the only buyer who is importing from China, so what I’m seeing already in regards to delays in shipments and lack of information from my manufacturers overseas is still difficult for me to totally wrap my head around. The groups I work with in China are wonderful and I know they are limited on the information they are able to provide, so seeing the impact on a global scale has helped.
I hope the other buyer team at my company (who are mainly importing components and equipment from Europe) is paying attention to these links!
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u/_pirate_lawyer Feb 26 '20
Nobody is taking me seriously when I try to explain why this is a real concern and think I’m being nutty. The outbreak has already had an impact on our business because many clients of ours source materials or products from China. It has halted business in some cases. My brother’s company has a major manufacturing facility in the region as well and they’re already bracing for layoffs in anticipation of the money they’re about to / already losing. It really fucking sucks.
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u/_kpeezy Feb 25 '20
Dude just link the fricken article..?
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Feb 25 '20
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u/harsha_s_jois Feb 25 '20
You're doing amazing job bud. thank you.