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BloombergBusinessweek November 23, 2020Up the Yangtze River from Wuhan lies the city of
Jingzhou, home to one of Reckitt’s biggest manufacturing
plants. (Most of the products made there are part of Lysol’s
sister brand, Dettol.) In late January, when lockdowns began
in Hubei province—which includes both cities—David Gao,
site director of the Jingzhou plant, called his lieutenants
and told them not to go home. The timing could hardly have
been worse; it was the start of the weeklong Chinese New
Year, when the whole country goes on vacation. About 350
of the factory’s 400 workers had already left the city, and not
enough remained to restart disinfectant production. With
the public-health crisis spiraling, Gao canceled his employ-
ees’ vacations and negotiated travel permits with the gov-
ernment to allow them to return to work. “I talked to the
government and told them we are the factory to make the
disinfectant,” Gao says.
The permits came through WeChat, and managers helped
return close to 300 people. One worker rode a bicycle six
hours to get to the plant, Gao says; another walked 13 hours.
The government helped put the Reckitt staff up in hotels
for weeks, isolated even from their families, and a neigh-
boring factory boss topped up the plant’s dwindling sup-
ply of masks in exchange for disinfectant. Gao says no one
at the plant got Covid. “The employees sacrificed a lot,” he
says. “Nobody quit.”BytheendofJanuarypeopleinEuropeweretesting
positive for the disease, the World Health Organization
had declared the coronavirus an international public-health
emergency, and Narasimhan, who’d been Reckitt’s CEO only
a few months, ordered his executives to maximize produc-
tion by any means necessary. “Guys, turn on the factories
24 hours,”herecallstellingthemduringa conferencecall.
“Wewentfullblast.”OO
neproblem withgoing fullblast wasthat every
consumer hygiene company in the world was doing
the same thing, and they all rely on a lot of the same
key ingredients. With Lysol and its rivals gobbling
uphundredsofthousandsofgallonsofethanoland
tonsofquats,therewasn’tenoughtogoaround,evenwhen
thepandemic-jumbled supply chain was at its best. And
like many global manufacturers, Reckitt keeps little spare
material on hand; it relies on shipping companies to deliver
steady supplies. “It’s a global supply chain, and it’s not inte-
grated,” says Frederick Dutrenit, senior vice president of
supply for the company’s health division.
The Jingzhou factory, for example, needed outside sup-
pliers to deliver more than 100 different raw materials and
parts. When he learned there wasn’t enough of a critical
chemical left in all of China to meet its increased production● PRODUCTS BEING TESTED IN THE MONTVALE R&D LAB