PrimeAsia imposes travel ban as China tannery returns to 100% capacity
Leather manufacturing group PrimeAsia has announced that operations at its tannery in Huangjiang in China returned to 100% of capacity on March 2.
In a statement, the company said that more than 85% of the workforce at PrimeAsia China and the whole of the facility’s senior management team had returned to work after restrictions enforced in February by the coronavirus outbreak.
It said it was “challenging” for the tannery to work at full capacity under the circumstances, but explained that close connections to its sister tannery in Vietnam and preparatory work it had done before the Lunar New Year holiday meant it was able to “fulfil all leather demand”. The group said it had “pre-positioned” 4 million square-feet of crust and finished leather before Lunar New Year (at the end of January) and that it was able to use this material now to help meet orders.
“The world continues to be very concerned about the global spread of the coronavirus,” PrimeAsia added, and it said its number-one priority remains the health and wellbeing of its employees around the world.
For this reason, it put a formal ban in place on March 1 on “non-essential international travel” to mitigate the risk of exposing the company’s employees to the coronavirus. The only immediate exception to this ban is for those employees still traveling back to their full-time base of operations in China or Vietnam. Any travel deemed to be essential international travel requires approval of chief executive, Jon Clark.
Even domestic travel is “discouraged”, the statement said, but continues to be permitted, except for China. However, the group insists that PrimeAsia personnel should find out the details of recent travel carried out by the people they meet. Face-to-face meetings with people that have been in the affected areas of the world within the last 21 days are banned.
“The situation remains extremely fluid,” the company said, “and beyond health concerns, we do not want to put any of our employees in a situation where they are not able to travel home due to unexpected border closings.”
