Companies on Shanghai’s initial whitelist have resumed over 80 percent of their production, with key enterprises like SAIC Motor and US carmaker Tesla seeing assembled cars roll off production lines while the production capacity of large semiconductor makers SMIC and Hua Hong Semiconductor maintains over 90 percent, effectively boosting work resumption among auxiliary companies, an official said on Saturday.

To orderly promote work resumption in key sectors, Shanghai has drawn up a second list of 1,188 companies, mainly in sectors including integrated circuits, automobile manufacturing, equipment manufacturing and biomedicine, Zhang Hongtao, chief engineer of the Shanghai Economic and Information Technology Commission, said during a press conference held in Shanghai on Saturday.

China has established a “whitelist” approach to support the resumption of work for key companies and minimize the impact of COVID-19 on the supply chain. By now, Shanghai’s whitelist authorizes a total of 1,854 companies to resume work.

In order to make it convenient for workers to return to their posts, Shanghai has released a digital pass card that is comprised of information including their identity, company and a negative nucleic acid result, with shuttle buses transporting them to their companies under closed-loop management, Zhang said. Shanghai has issued over 10,000 such cards, he said, noting that another 30,000 more workers have returned to their posts via other measures.
Meanwhile, inter-provincial logistics has also been making improvements, Zhang said.

To support the smooth production of enterprises in sectors like automobile and chemical industry in Shanghai, the other three provinces in the Yangtze River Delta region have set up a special work group to coordinate production and supply of upstream and downstream enterprises to ensure smooth inter-provincial transport of core component and raw materials.

“We are ramping up efforts to help companies solve difficulties in resuming production,” Zhang said, noting that local authorities are boosting key enterprises to restart production under anti-pandemic requirements with measures like drawing up problem list and setting up “red light,” “yellow light” and “green light” mechanism in the supply chain.

Zhou Lan, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce, said at the same briefing that commerce companies in the city are also steadily resuming business. She said that the number of orders on major e-commerce platforms hit 3.41 million per day, recovering to 54.1 percent the amount seen in usual times.

In the next step, we will also release a whitelist in the sector and use digital cards to boost commerce business resumption, she said. “Under the basis of strictly implementing anti-pandemic measures, we will gradually promote both services models of online booking and on-site consumption to restore the vitality of the commerce system as soon as possible,” she said.

Global Times