18th March 2020, Albourne, United Kingdom – The COVID-19 crisis is a challenging time for everyone. We hope you and your family are keeping safe and well through this difficult time.
COVID-19 has been an evolving situation for us. Firstly, in recent weeks there were issues with our manufacturing and supply chains affecting some product manufactured in South East Asia, but it only affected a few specific lines. Technetix, being risk averse, has had all headend, network equipment, line passives and multi-taps largely manufactured in Taiwan. Taiwan was not locked down and therefore little affected, this has put us in a robust position and afforded us a higher level of durability. Some of our products, like indoor passives and CPE accessories, are manufactured in mainland China and they have been affected. This mainly being an interruption in the restart of manufacturing after the Chinese New Year two week break. These issues are largely conquered and behind us and they have, on average, generated an additional two-week delay in restoring manufacturing. The good news on COVID-19, as is well publicised, both China and Taiwan have stabilised the virus situation and new virus cases have largely ceased.
Secondly, the spread of the virus globally has brought new challenges for us as it has now moved to Europe and Americas to potentially disrupt our own operations. We rapidly introduced extensive mitigation plans to respond to this. With almost all of our staff having laptop computers, we have been able to seamlessly introduce secure home working for key functions such as customer service, sales, finance, operations and admin. Certain key functions like our warehouses, quality control and R&D have to continue to operate from our facilities. But the areas in which they operate will be locked down to isolate them from other staff, visitors and other functions to minimise infection risks. Over the coming weeks, we will evolve these measures to meet the challenges that wider spread of the virus will cause in the community.
We are taking maximum precautions for the protection of our staff and customers as recommended by the governments of the territories in which we operate:
- Meeting strictly all local government directives and recommendations
- Meeting customers or suppliers remotely not face-to-face unless it is a critical situation
- Ceasing all travel, moving to use of calls and video conferencing unless critical
- Ensuring that all staff self-isolate if they or any member of their family have COVID-19 symptoms
We will continue to closely monitor the situation in order to respond immediately to any changes in guidance. At this moment in time, in line with government guidance, it remains business as usual and we are here to support you. Technetix is a resilient business supported by the spirit of a great team, which has the ability to overcome the challenges thrown at it; this is what has made us successful over the last 30 years and will continue to into the future. We will come out of this stronger and thank you for your understanding through this difficult time.
Stay safe and healthy.
Best Regards
