"A real cash printer" - Chinese mask producers meet global demand

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to spread across the globe, thousands of Chinese factories have switched production to a new and highly profitable market - face masks for export.

In early February, during the height of China's outbreak, a company in the country's northeast designed and created a new face mask in eleven days. The company's factory, which has five production lines, started producing the masks which were in high demand as the numbers of those with the infection surged.

As cases in China have now dropped, the factory's owner, Guan Xunze, is profiting from new markets and the export of the much in demand face masks to Italy, where the death toll has now overtaken that of China.

In the first two months of 2020, nearly 9,000 new manufacturers in China began producing masks in a race to fill the gap in demand.

As the virus epicentre of Hubei province was placed on lockdown and the numbers of infected people began falling in China, new outbreaks emerged across the world.

There are now over 500,000 cases of coronavirus worldwide and demand for protective equipment is soaring as countries everywhere battle the outbreak.

“A mask machine is a real cash printer,” said Shi Xinghui, sales manager of an N95 mask machine company in Dongguan city, southeastern Guangdong province. “The profit of a mask now is at least several cents compared to less than one in the past."

“Printing 60,000 or 70,000 masks a day is equivalent to printing money.”

A licence to print money, it may be, but there has already been problems with the hasty manufacturing of protective equipment. 

Yesterday, the Chinese embassy in Madrid announced that the Spanish government had bought a batch of faulty coronavirus testing kits from an "unauthorised" company in China called Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology.

In a message on Twitter, it said the order had not been part of the €432 million ($466m) contract with China that the Spanish government announced Wednesday (25 March), which would include the delivery of 5.5 million testing kits.

“The Chinese ministry of commerce offered Spain a list of certified providers, which did not include Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology. Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology has not yet been licensed by the Chinese National Medical Products Administration to sell its products,” he said. 

The head of Spain’s public health emergency department Fernando Simon confirmed in his daily briefing that the first batch of kits delivered to the country had been sent back to the provider, although he did not name the company in question. 

“Spain obtained several providers and supply routes. The first one sent a batch of 9,000 tests that were validated at the National Center of Epidemiology and some hospitals (in Madrid).

However, “the specifications of the batch did not match up with the certification of quality that came with it, which meant they had to be returned and the company will change them,” he said.

The Spanish association of microbiologists (SEIMC) warned that the testing kits in this batch performed with an accuracy level of under 30%,

“With this level of accuracy, it is impossible to put them into routine use,” SEIMC spokeswoman María del Mar Tomás told EFE.

Spain's death toll now stands at over 4,800 and is still rising. The country remains the fourth worst-hit in terms of confirmed cases

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