Lu-Ve CEO rues lack of coordinated Covid-19 measures
6th April 2020
ITALY: With Lu-Ve’s global production running at around 50% capacity, CEO Matteo Liberali has criticised the lack of a coordinated adoption of shared measures to deal with the Covid-19 emergency.
Hopes that production could be restarted at Lu-Ve’s factories in Italy and India, laws forcing their closure have now been extended to at least April 13.
“As was unfortunately foreseeable, the emergency linked to the notorious COVID 19 has progressively spread across the world, leading to the adoption of increasingly drastic measures in different countries,” Matteo Liberali states in an open letter on the company’s website.
“It is sad to note that once again what I had hoped for was missing; coordination at least at the European Union level in the adoption of timely and shared measures to deal with the current emergency, instead of actually creating the conditions for the further spread of the virus and at the same time causing confusion and unequal treatment and the possibility of competing between companies from different countries.”
In Italy, Lu-Ve has one production line operating dedicated to machines for the hospital sector and shipments of ready-made products in stock and spare parts. Lu-Ve has also requested permissions for a partial reopening of other production lines in response to requests it claims to have received from customers active in strategic sectors.
After six working days of “lock down”, the company’s factory in Russia is due to reopen on April 7, following the inclusion of the refrigeration chain among activities considered strategic.
The Chinese plant in Tianmen, Hubei, gradually restarted production from March 13, after a one-month closure. The group’s other foreign plants, in Finland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden and the USA, are currently operational, but is aware that various local authorities may take increasingly restrictive measures to counter the expansion of the Covid-19 epidemic.
Overall, Lu-Ve estimates its group production capacity to date in lock down at around 50-55%. A potential supply problem has been mitigated by the fact that some important customers have also stopped production, thus allowing a delay on the delivery of some orders. Lu-Ve has also been able to transfer some production from the closed factories to those in operation.
