The world’s largest rubber glove manufacturer said this week that orders would be delayed by a week and that some of its factories would close after thousands of its employees tested positive for COVID-19.
“To minimize the impact on our customers, we are allocating sales orders to the affected factories and will reschedule deliveries where possible,” Malaysia’s Top Glove Corp said in a statement.
Delivery could be as long as four weeks and new orders could take even longer, according to the company.
As Reuters notes ReportThe company’s stock has risen in value this year due to high demand for personal protective equipment. The company orders a quarter of the global latex glove market.
Top Glove operates 47 factories in Asia, producing 36 of them. Earlier it had to close 16 factories and reduce the capacity of 12 others. The company did not say in its statement how many factories would be affected by the new order.
The production capacity of the top glove will normally be 50 per cent of what it produces, according to NG Bay Shan, an industrial industrial development finance research analyst in Malaysia.
Malaysia produces about two-thirds of all rubber gloves in the world, according to the Malaysian Rubber Glove Manufacturers Association. The other two major glove manufacturers, Hartalega Holdings and Supermax Corp., are believed to have the potential for the expected delay caused by the shutdown of the top glove.
Klang, west of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, where top-glove factories and dormitories are located, has seen an increase in new cases, according to the country’s health ministry.
To combat this cluster, the largest Malaysia so far has seen, barbed wire and bolts were erected in front of workers’ hostels in the country and outposts were set up with police and soldiers.
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