German automaker Volkswagen is one of the foreign partners of state-owned automaker SAIC in China. Pictured here on June 7, 2022, is the joint venture’s factory in Shanghai.
Kilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
BEIJING – Factories in two of China’s COVID-hit economic centers have resumed work as the virus impacts, according to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
In Shanghai, the city with China’s biggest GDP, 96.3% of industrial businesses tracked by the government have resumed work with production rates exceeding 70%, Deputy Minister Xin Guobin told reporters on Tuesday.
Xin said that in the southern province of Guangdong, which is an industrial hub, production has basically returned to normal.
Shanghai attempted a full reopening this month after nearly two months of lockdown to control the Covid outbreak. Parts of Guangdong were briefly closed in March. Some factories, mainly a few hundred on a government whitelist, were allowed to operate if workers lived on site in a bubble.
Tesla Xin said it had achieved full production, while Shanghai-based local state-owned automaker SAIC saw production increase by about 60% year-on-year in early June. SAIC is also a partner for Volkswagen and General Motors in China.
Tesla, Volkswagen and GM did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
As for Shanghai’s auto industry, production is “continuously increasing,” Shin said in Mandarin, according to a CNBC translation. He did not share specific figures.
In the neighboring provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, Xin said, resuming work and production was “better than expected”, without providing numbers.
“Many companies said that through a two-month effort in May and June, they would try to achieve delayed production from March and April,” Shin said.
