In the past months we have taken multiple actions to increase our production output and overall capacity, while still maintaining a high product quality. The challenges we faced in this time were manifold. They included material shortages  due to Corona induced closure of suppliers starting in China and then affecting many countries all over the world. We faced quality issues in raw materials, that immediately impacted our production output and long lead times of new production machines that did not allow us to ramp up production as fast as required by our customers.

With the ongoing spread of the virus in more and more countries, Malaysia faced an increasing numbers of Corona cases which which led to a closing down of all companies not classified as systemically relevant by the Malaysian government . Unfortunately, we were included in this lockdown initiated by the Malaysian Movement Control Order (MCO). We were able to obtain an exemption permission after two weeks to resume production under strict conditions. The regulations included reduced manpower, access control, sanitary precautions and social distancing, which could only be achieved by rearranging our production lines. With the remaining staff, we continued production on a low level to keep up the supply of thermopile sensors. On June 1, we were allowed to start hiring new staff, which was the first major progress to increased sensor production.

Since July 1, our Operations Manager, who lives in Singapore, is allowed to enter the country again. After a quarantine of two weeks, he was allowed to enter our production building on July 15th for the first time in four months of lockdown.

Meanwhile, the situation in many countries seemed to have settled a little. After we have been able to overcome the biggest challenges our target is to double the weekly sensor production compared to 2019 by the end of this year.