Everyone is looking for ventilators from China, so how many is China producing?

Since our TLD post cautioning everyone looking for ventilators to be careful of the scam in China, we have received a number of emails from our readers telling us their experience being scammed by exactly the same tactic, or new tactics of scammers that we had not heard before.

Anyway, a lingering question for many is: how many ventilators has China really produced, and/or exported?

We mentioned in our previous article:

”Currently there are 21 manufacturers of invasive ventilators in China, amongst which 8 have received CE certification, with a combined weekly production capacity of 2200 units, or ⅕ of the global production output.”

In fact Ministry of Industry and Information Technology actually announced some numbers on the 8th of April:

Since the Covid-19 outbreak, major Chinese ventilator manufacturers have supplied 29,000 ventilators of various builds. Amongst these 18,000 units were supplied to Hubei, including 3000 invasive ventilators.

According to the Ministry’s information pooled from different factories, a total of 18,000 units have been supplied to foreign customers, including 4000 invasive ventilators.

Many of the non-invasive ones are actually designed to cure snoring – and even sold at B2C ecommerce platforms.

As you can see, the number of invasive ventilators supplied so far has been very small, the actual orders is more than 10 times of this, and still increasing on a daily basis.

What is holding production back? We spoke with a few key manufacturers – and the answer is almost unanimous:

“Look, we can expand our production facility, hire more people, and do more over-time,” the saying goes. “However, we do not have control over the full supply chain. We do not have enough key components to increase capacity.”

As we understand, many of the key electronic components are actually not produced in China, and typically requires a long lead time.

Whether the upstream factories can ramp up production for the ventilator manufacturers is a big question mark.

That’s why many factories in China have stopped taking new orders – sort of.

So be realistic about what you can possibly get, and do not fall for scammers (they understand your anxiety of getting hold to as many machines as early as possible).