How a Single Covid Case Rocked the World’s Biggest Carmaker
- Southeast Asia becomes a choke point for world’s top carmaker
- Delta outbreak exposing a system vulnerable to external shocks
Early last month at a sprawling factory on the highway connecting Hanoi to the Vietnamese port city of Haiphong, a single worker tested positive for Covid-19. The delta variant was spreading swiftly through the Southeast Asian nation at the time, and on Aug. 4, provincial officials suspended work at the plant, run by an auto-parts manufacturer.
An ocean away, Toyota Motor Corp. Chief Purchasing Group Officer Kazunari Kumakura was watching intently. The factory is operated by a key Toyota supplier and is one of Vietnam’s biggest assemblers of wire harnesses -- a basic but essential yoke for cables that holds the inner workings of an automobile together. As the infection at the facility disrupted operations, Toyota’s inventories grew thin. Since July, the Japanese automaker had been examining its suppliers in the region, which has become a Covid hotspot, on a daily basis to assess how dire things were getting.