The epidemic escalates, cities in Southeast Asian countries are closed.
In the past week, the number of confirmed cases of new COVID-19 in Vietnam has set a new record 4 times. According to the latest data released by the Ministry of Health of Vietnam on the 24th, July,in the past 24 hours, there have been 7968 new confirmed cases of new coronary pneumonia in Vietnam, of which 7937 were local infections, a record high in a single day since the outbreak last year. Nearly 5,000 of them were in Ho Chi Minh in the south. city.
Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, also began implementing a 15-day “cities lockdown order” on the 24th of this month to curb the continuing spread of the new crown epidemic. At the same time, the Vietnamese health department requires local companies and factories to start operations and production only after all employees have a negative nucleic acid test. Therefore, many foreign factories in Vietnam announced the suspension of work, and tire factories in Vietnam were also affected.
Recently, there have been media reports that KENDA Tire (Vietnam) Co., Ltd. announced that due to the impact of the epidemic, the factory has made a decision to suspend operations. The suspension date is July 22, 2021-August 1, 2021. In order to cope with this situation, tires will be deployed through other factories.
Many tire companies deploy factories in Vietnam
According to DOT code statistics of global tire factories, there are currently 19 tire factories in Vietnam, excluding the newly-built factories of Guizhou Tire and Jinyu Tire. Among them, there are 5 local tire manufacturers and the rest are foreign tire companies. They are Bridgestone, Michelin, Yokohama, Kumho, CTS, KENDA, Sailun, Guizhou, Jinyu, and Cooper. Among them, Cooper’s factory is a joint venture with Sailun, and Michelin is the Camso factory. Yokohama has two factories.
Guizhou Tire recently stated that due to the increasingly serious epidemic, the construction progress of its Vietnam project has been affected. Sailun Tire revealed that the company's Vietnam factory is currently producing normally, and the Vietnam factory has been actively carrying out epidemic prevention and control to prevent employees from getting infected when they go out.
Hankook Tire ceases production again
With the exception of Vietnam, with the rapid spread of Delta coronavirus variants and the slow promotion of vaccines, the global epidemic situation is still not optimistic. A few days ago, Hankook Tire’s Geumsan factory in South Korea stopped production on July 24 due to some workers who tested positive for the coronavirus and restarted production 48 hours later. Hankook Tire did not disclose the specific number of confirmed cases. South Korean health authorities have set up a testing center at the plant and will conduct virus testing and screening on approximately 3,000 employees of the plant this week.
According to China Tire Business Network, this is the second time Hankook Tire has stopped production since the second half of the year. In June, Hankook Tire was forced to suspend production for three days due to sea transportation, resulting in a reduction of 400,000 tires. The root cause of the suspension of production is actually the epidemic. Affected by the new crown epidemic, the handling capacity of ports around the world has declined, which has led to longer shipping times. Coupled with the continued impact of the Suez Canal in March this year, container accumulation has occurred in many ports around the world. Faced with the difficulty of finding a "cabin", many tire companies not only pressurize a large amount of cargo, but also pay high cargo storage fees.
From the beginning of 2021 to the present, the market is full of hope for the global economy to gradually recover from the haze of the new crown pneumonia epidemic. However, the current accelerated global spread of the delta mutant strain seems to be telling people: the epidemic has not gone far, the global economic recovery may not be as smooth as expected, and the epidemic control still cannot be careless!
