Wuhan company sees surge in overseas orders of medical products
By Hu Chao and Guo Yuanheng
02:13

While China's battle against COVID-19 is winding down, the fight is alive and well inside factories that make protective gear. Overseas orders for masks, gloves and other items are at an all time high. CGTN visited a major producer in Wuhan, where the new coronavirus was first detected, to show the changing dynamics of the city's fight against the virus.

The Zhongsen Medical Products Company in Wuhan is one of the largest producers of its kind in Hubei Province. It has been working at full capacity since the city's lockdown in January. Since early March, overseas orders have started to surge, reaching 10 times the volume before the outbreak – an unprecedented rise.

Ye Tianhong, the company's global market director, said, "Clients from Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands have asked us for products. They were in urgent need of medical supplies in less than a week by air transport. So far we already have orders worth 50 million U.S. dollars and we are supposed to deliver them by the end of May."

The company makes a variety of medical products and has been exporting them for more than two decades. Clients are from Europe, the U.S. and Southeast Asia.

A factory worker is packaging a protective suit. /CGTN Photo

A factory worker is packaging a protective suit. /CGTN Photo

Han Kewei, deputy general manager at the company, is in charge of technology and quality control. "We have all the required qualifications and are able to make products that meet EU, U.S. and Japanese standards. We've achieved a certificate of a quality assurance system and set up a quality control working group," he said.

The company now makes 200,000 masks and 40,000 protective suits a day. As orders continue to grow, they plan to add five more mask production lines to increase daily production capacity to 700,000 pieces.

As many virus-hit countries now face a severe shortage of masks, the company also reminds clients to use specific masks for different occasions.

"When you purchase protective masks, you must confirm whether they are for use by doctors or ordinary people. Their quality standards are different. The bacterial filtration efficiency of ordinary face masks reach 95 percent while surgical masks reach above 98 percent and must go through sterilization," Ye said.

As Wuhan still has some of its own confirmed cases, the company has been following strict measures to ensure the health of its workers. Since the outbreak, all of them have been arranged to rest and eat in an isolated hotel to avoid contact with outside people.