China: Covid Lockdowns Impacting Exports

Cities throughout China are still battling Covid with lockdown measures, which has impacted export production in many areas.

Right now, there are believed to be 33 cities in the country that have partial or full Covid restrictions in place, which is affecting 65 million people.

Chengdu was the most recent city to go into full lockdown earlier this month. With 21.5 million residents, this became the largest lockdown since Shanghai’s eight week closure in June. It’s citizens have endured heatwaves, power cuts, food shortages, quarantine and last week an earthquake that killed 65 people.

Other key economic centres, including the port cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Dalian and Tianjin have also been subject to Covid measures. Most of the 18 million people in the city of Shenzhen remain under some form of restrictions.

There has been a general dip in demand for Chinese products, which followed the post outbreak period of astronomical ocean freight rates. Therefore, with the country also still enforcing its zero tolerance approach to Covid, there looks to be challenging times ahead for the country and its export production.