China’s COVID-19 Recovery: What Lies Ahead for Foreign Investors

While the attention of the COVID-19 pandemic moves away from China, businesses are slowly getting back to normal in the country. That means relief not just for foreign investors based in the country but also for overseas sourcing and manufacturers around the world who are reliant on Chinese supplies.

But how reliable will the return to normality in China be? How long will it last? What are the options?

We deal with these issues in the below sections.

COVID-19: A return to normality

Unlike many commentators on the COVID-19 issue, our firm has several hundred employees and 12 offices in mainland China, plus another in Hong Kong. We also have offices and staff in India, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines. We have several thousand clients in all regions across China as well as Southeast Asia, and a subscriber base for our Asian-focused websites, such as this, running to 250,000. We are in touch with this pool of on-the-ground resources on a daily basis – meaning we pretty much know what we’re talking about.

There is also precedence. We operated as a business throughout the SARS epidemic in 2003, in addition to the H5N1 outbreak. SARS, while not on the scale of COVID-19, also affected businesses in China – quarantines, towns and villages in lockdown, and factories cutting back production.

However, China has changed since then as seen in the following table.

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