Plastiflex Covid-19 update - March 23rd 2020 – ramp up of production Health Care tubes

With this communication, we want to give you an update on the status of the Plastiflex operations and the impact of Covid-19 on our business.

1. Safety of our employees, customers, suppliers

We have followed local and national Covid-19 policies and implemented all the precautionary and prevention measures to protect the health of all our staff.  We have activated all the necessary safety and hygiene measures in all of our global production plants and branches (copied -and amended to follow local and national regulation- from the measures already taken back in February for our Chinese operations).

2. Operations

Plastiflex is one of the leading manufacturers of plastic flexible tubes for various markets. One specific market we serve is the Health Care market in which we are one of the key players with regards to the production of tubes for respiratory care and CPAP devices. Most of the Health Care tubes are produced in our Dongguan, China facility. The good news is that this factory has regained its full capacity since last week.

We have been seeing an exponential increase in orders for our tubes as most of our customers in the respiratory care (ventilator manufacturers etc.) have received emergency orders from the various governments around the world. We foresee that this demand will further increase in the next couple of weeks.

During this time of Covid-19 crisis, it is our duty to assist in the efforts made to tackle this pandemic.  In order to substantially increase our output, the following measures have been put in action:

• 24/7 production in our China facility
• Accelerated hire and training program for new employees in order to further ramp up production
• Acceleration of start-up of our new Health Care facility in Mexico
• Increase awareness with the authorities that sleep tubes could also be used to give breathing relief to non-critical Covid-19 patients – production capacity on Respiratory care tubes is almost 100% booked but there is still a lot of capacity on sleep tubes
• Further acceleration of our R&D program to launch vaporizing respiratory care tubes
• Ensure together with our suppliers that the supply chain does not show any hick-ups (resins, components, packaging)

In case of any questions related to Health Care tubes, you can always contact our Vice President Health Care, Ronan Horseele on ronan.horseele@plastiflex.com

• Our Suzhou (China) facility is 100% operational and demand from our customer base has returned back to normal.
• Our operations in the rest of the world (outside China) are still running  normal, we do see some increased absence in the countries where schools are closed ( as some staff need to watch their kids) and we have seen so far only limited order cancelations/delays.

3. Thank you to our employees

We can only be proud and thank our employees who continue to work in these challenging times. It is obviously key to stay safe but we also have a responsibility towards society (obviously for the Health Care tube production but not only for these products, think about all the Plastiflex tubes that are used to clean homes, factories etc.). It is therefore good to see that we protect the health and safety of our employees but in the meantime continue our operations.

4. Thanks to our customers and suppliers

Last but not least, we would like to thank our customers for understanding and accepting the challenging conditions and our vendors and other partners for continuing working together.