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Hong Kong’s new face mask market: from outdoor furniture manufacturers to filmmakers, here’s how companies adapted
- Hong Kong went from having virtually no mask factories in January to as many as 150 today as companies with no prior experience jumped in
- Despite a vaccine getting closer, most companies still expect demand to last for at least six months, and are now fighting it out to dominate the market
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Hong Kong-based outdoor furniture maker 3i Corporation saw its exports to the US and Europe start to stagnate at the beginning of the year as the first reverberations of an economically disastrous global pandemic were felt.
To weather the downturn that was to come, the family firm with the unlikely name decided to do what dozens of others were doing: make protective face masks.
It started out with two machines in a factory in San Po Kong in April. Today it boasts six, capable of producing hundreds of thousands of masks a day, sold not only online but via three shops.
June was a landmark month for the company, as it first broke through HK$1 million in monthly sales. A month after that, it had blown past the HK$5 million mark, and it has now ridden that wave to just under HK$10 million today.
“It’s been a crazy rabbit hole that we’ve gone down” said Albert Chen, a son in the family business and CEO of its face mask spin-off, Masklab.
Prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus, there were few if any companies in Hong Kong making face masks, according to several industry executives interviewed by the South China Morning Post.
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