The coronavirus also affects motorcycles: Honda temporarily closes two vital factories in China

2023 Author: Nicholas Abramson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 02:44

China it is very important for the motorcycle world. It is the country in which a large part of the brands bet on having factories to produce different models. With the tragic development of the coronavirus 2019-nCoV, a virus that has already killed at least 170 people in the world and has infected more than 7,000 (including countries like France and Germany in Europe), several vehicle brands have decided to close their factories, including Honda.

Although the quarantine imposed by the Chinese government was in the epicenter of the virus, the city of Wuhan (capital of the province of Hubei, located in central China), the Japanese manufacturer has decided to stop the activity of its factories both in Tianjin (Northeast China) as in Taicang, a coastal city located in the east of the country next to Sanghai.

The virus affects health and the economy worldwide

The factories that have stopped their entire process, managed by Sundiro Honda Motorcycle Co., annually produce up to 350,000 motorcycles in the case of Tianjin and 500,000 units in Taicang. This accounts for 40% of total production that Honda has in China, according to the Japanese newspaper Mainichi.

This epidemic has coincided precisely with the Chinese New Year, at which time the factories already planned to stop their production. In the case of the two plants, it was planned that they would resume their work on February 2, but the Japanese directive has decided to extend this break for one more week until at least February 9.

The coronavirus is not only a global health problem because it is already an epidemic that is spreading throughout the world. The fact that an economic center as important as Wuhan is paralyzed makes investors have been nervous and we have already seen how, for example, in the Stock Market the price of raw materials such as oil has been punished.

This stoppage is also going to irreparably affect the manufacturers' sales at the end of the year. If motorcycles are not manufactured, there are no units to sell so the profit will be lower, so in economic terms we could also foresee that the annual results will not be the same as those of the brand at the beginning of the year; and the longer this situation lasts, the worse the numbers will be.

Irremediably this situation it will also affect customers that in the long term they will probably have to wait longer for the motorcycle that you have bought to be delivered. The delivery time will also depend on how long it takes for the Chinese government to control the coronavirus and for scientists to figure out how to stop it.

Honda is by no means the only large company that has been affected by this situation. We can read such global names as the PSA group, Renault, Nissan, Starbucks, General Motors, Google, Apple, Iberia … which are also suffering the consequences of the 2019-nCov pathogen that became really dangerous when went from being infected from animal-animal to animal-person.

The forecast is not at all flattering and, although in these cases it is not necessary to be alarming, the truth is that it makes the uncertainty even greater and the chaos grows with each passing day.

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