This Mask Maker Is Making a Blacklist of Coronavirus Price...

	This Mask Maker Is Making a Blacklist of Coronavirus Price Gougers
1	29/04/2020 10:30PM
2	By Stuart Condie Magnus Nicolin isn't on the front line of the coronavirus crisis, but his company's products are. For more than a decade Mr. Nicolin has led Ansell Ltd., a major supplier of what are now some of the world's hottest commodities: the safety suits, gloves, goggles and masks that first responders and medical workers rely on to keep them safe as coronavirus cases climb. The virus has overwhelmed health-care systems world-wide and sparked panic buying by worried shoppers. In protective gloves alone, the Australian company -- which employs 12,000 people and took in US$1.6 billion in sales revenue last year -- turns out more than 10 billion a year. Ansell felt the shocks of the pandemic early: In January, supply lines in central China jammed, preventing its products from moving to ports from factories. Now Mr. Nicolin faces another challenge: a surge in orders for personal protective equipment from companies abruptly adopting stringent new workplace-safety practices. The 63-year-old Mr. Nicolin recently spoke to The Wall Street Journal from his home in Brussels, one of Ansell's corporate hubs, where he has spent the past eight weeks in lockdown. Here are edited excerpts: WSJ: Where is demand right now? Mr. Nicolin: We're seeing new safety protocols being implemented by industrial and health-care companies alike. For example, a big automotive company came to us and asked us, "Could you provide effective protection to all of our 100,000 workers around the world? Both suits and gloves, with a new suit and gloves issued every day for every worker?" This has never happened before. WSJ: Does this raise concerns about raw-material costs? Mr. Nicolin: No, except on clothing material because clothing material is the same which is used to make masks, and there are now 25,000 new companies in China producing masks. On top of that, you have a number of not-so-scrupulous players taking advantage, and we're seeing prices of some of these materials go up two, three, four, 500% in the last month. WSJ: What has been your response? Mr. Nicolin: Look around, find another supplier. If that is impossible, then in a number of cases we are reluctantly paying the cost to get the materials so we can keep on delivering these lifesaving products. But we're taking notes. This extreme situation is going to settle down at some point, and these companies are going to be on our blacklist. WSJ: Are you seeing that sort of behavior elsewhere? Mr. Nicolin: We have had a couple of distributors that we sell to and then they turn around and they add on 100% markup. Whenever we see that, we essentially cut them off and redirect our efforts to their competitors instead. WSJ: Have you been able to get products to customers? Mr. Nicolin: It was quite difficult about six weeks ago. It was difficult getting products out of Southeast Asia. There was a lack of shipping containers, many ports were totally clogged up. It was virtually impossible to get products from inland China to the coast, because truck drivers weren't allowed to pass across interstate borders and stuff like that. That's all essentially gone away, and we're seeing close to normal operation out of the Chinese and southeast Asian ports. The big challenge now is air freighting. A very high percentage of airfreight capacity in the world is on passenger planes and, of course, there are very few passenger planes flying now. WSJ: Has Asia been the primary concern? Mr. Nicolin: We saw a lot of infighting in Europe. Europe is supposed to be the European Common Market, and yet we saw every country fending for themselves for a period of time, with artificial export barriers inside the EU. All of a sudden, there were new controls and sometimes even local governments laying claim to shipments they had no right to. Most of those limitations have been removed and now we're starting to see goods flow. We saw the same thing in the U.S., by the way. The U.S. government is doing some export controls that included a lot of PPE categories, so we couldn't all of a sudden export from our main warehouse in the U.S. into Canada or Mexico. That, too, is being resolved now. WSJ: How has the lockdown affected you and Ansell staff? Mr. Nicolin: I've never spent this much time in one place in my entire career. I'm normally on the road 70% of the time. Meetings are much shorter because they're virtual and a bit more targeted. I also do a lot more one-on-ones, with people two or three levels down in the organization to just listen in. I'm getting amazing ideas and advice, and some ideas eventually evolve into a plan of attack and a slightly different strategy. WSJ: What changes do you envision will last beyond the pandemic? Mr. Nicolin: The way this company's going to be managed post-Covid is going to be quite different from the way we managed it before. We are probably forever going to be traveling less, because we've learned we can actually run this company virtually, quite nicely. We're probably going to have smaller offices, and the offices are going to primarily be for meetings and training and technical support and far less for sitting and doing your job. If our customer-service teams can work from home with good system support, then why not let them? We're getting more productivity from them than when they're in the office. Write to Stuart Condie at [email protected] (END) Dow Jones Newswires April 29, 2020 08:30 ET (12:30 GMT) Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.