COVID still creates worries at China’s PCB factories
China’s new COVID regulation at the beginning of December 2022 and the subsequent spread of the infection has been a hot topic in the industry since the turn of the year. NCAB is reporting that it has observed extremely high infection rates throughout China, especially in the Shenzhen region.
This all occurred at the same time as the country was getting ready for the shutdown during Chinese New Year, which had a significant impact on factories.
NCAB says that the company saw an infection rate of 75% to 95% across its factory network during the December and January period. The company states in a company update that vast majority of workers have recovered, and that they are currently recording 95% attendance rates on average. Some factories are seeing lower numbers, and other are running at full staffing levels.
The company continues to state that the employee shortages during this time period caused minor disruptions in response times and internal delays in the production processes, but that these issues were promptly resolved as soon as employees returned to work.
NCAB concludes that since this happened the company has been able to work in planned and proactive ways as we moved closer to the Chinese New Year shut downs – which are now ongoing.
“Early in December we anticipated that the new COVID regulations in China could lead to challenges and disturbances in production and supply. With that in mind we took action to pull in orders and firm up control of the supply chain, which has helped us manage the recent weeks without significant impact on our delivery performance,” the company writes in the update.
The company says that it prepared action plans together with its factories to find different ways of working around any potential disruptions.
