When the Pandemic Hit, Six of Our Machines Were Stuck in China

On January 22, the twenty-eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, I was at home in Shenzhen packing for the trip back to Hunan for Chinese New Year. That afternoon the news said Wuhan was going into lockdown. I stared at my phone for ten minutes, and my first thought was not my family; it was the six machines sitting in the yard.

The six machines made up three shipments. Two CAT 320 excavators bound for Dar es Salaam, one XCMG 50 wheel loader for Lagos, and three road rollers for Mombasa. All were contracts signed before Chinese New Year, with sailings booked for February 4, 9, and 14.

On the twenty-sixth of the twelfth lunar month, the machines were still getting their final wash and wax at the yard in Panyu, Guangzhou. As usual, the trucks would come in on the sixth day of the new year and reach Nansha port for customs on the eighth, two days of slack. We had followed that routine for four years without a single problem.

What happened next, everyone knows. On the second day of the new year, a rope went up at the entrance of my home village in Hunan. Everyone in and out had to register, and outsiders were not allowed in.

Not a Single Truck Driver Could Come Back

We outsource our trucking, working long-term with five drivers: four from Hubei, one from Nanyang, Henan. On the fourth day of the new year I called them one by one. The four Hubei drivers said their villages were sealed and they could not get out. The Nanyang driver could get out but did not dare drive: too many checkpoints on the road, temperature checks a dozen times per trip, and no hot meal to be had at any service area.

I started looking for new trucks. Normally, hauling one excavator from Panyu to Nansha costs 2,800 yuan. In those days I made more than twenty calls, and the quotes went from 4,500 to 8,000, and still nobody would take the job. It was not about money. Nobody dared to go out.

On February 1 I finally scraped together two trucks. A driver from Dongguan took extra pay on the condition that he would not get out of the cab the whole way and would eat in the truck. Two trucks could only move two machines a day, and the queue for temperature checks at the highway entrance was three hours long. The driver told me afterward that crossing the Humen Bridge, it was so empty you could hear the wind.

For the February 4 sailing, we only made it with the two CATs. The other four, we watched the ship leave without them. That night I stayed in the yard past ten, the four machines parked under the floodlights like four mountains of iron.

Twenty-Three Days in the Yard

Four machines stuck in the yard, with storage and watchman fees adding up to 1,200 yuan a day. Worse was the contracts. All three shipments had late-delivery penalties written in: three thousandths of the contract value per day.

Lao Chen, the yard owner, has to eat too, but he knocked three days off my fees. He said nobody has it easy this year; his yard did not move a single machine in the first half of February, and he still had to pay his management fees.

I called each of the three customers. Mohamed in Tanzania was calm. He said he had been watching the news from China on TV, and his question was not about the cargo; it was whether anyone in my family was sick. I said everyone was fine. He said that is what matters; the cargo can be a few days late, people come first.

Chidi in Nigeria did not accept it. His customer was waiting for the rollers to start work, and he would have to pay for the delay too. I understood him. A contract is a contract. We were the ones in breach; the pandemic was not the customer's fault.

How We Negotiated the Penalties

On the penalties, I did not wait for our finance team; I ran the numbers myself first. Three shipments, the longest delay twenty-three days, the shortest nine. Calculated line by line per the contracts, it came to just over US$38,000.

I sent the calculation sheet to each of the three customers individually, spelling out the contracted arrival date, the actual shipping date, and the penalty amount. When Chidi got the sheet he called me: our own calculation came out two hundred dollars higher than his. Was that a mistake? I said no; the two days of port demurrage were on us too.

He laughed on the phone and said fine, he will take the money, and the orders continue.

Thirty-eight thousand dollars is about a month and a half of the company's gross profit. Finance asked me whether we could claim force majeure to reduce it. I said no. Those four words, force majeure, are for saving your life, not for dodging your debts.

Those Six Hundred Face Masks

By mid-February, masks were becoming available again in China but no longer abroad. Mohamed told me on the phone that the pharmacies in Dar es Salaam were sold out, and his sister, who works at a hospital, had no masks.

Chen Guodong and I talked it over, and the company bought six hundred masks and forty bottles of hand sanitizer, shipped in three parcels: two hundred masks for Tanzania, two hundred for Nigeria, two hundred for Kenya. International express, 3,700 yuan in freight. Shipping masks back then was a hassle; I filled out the customs declaration three times before it went through.

The day the masks arrived, Mohamed sent me a photo: his sister standing at the hospital entrance wearing a mask, thumb up. I still have that photo in my phone.

By the end of April, all three shipments had arrived at port. After receiving his cargo, Chidi sent me a one-line message: next year I want three more. Sure enough, this year he ordered three more.

In mid-May I ran the full tally. Three shipments: US$38,000 in penalties, over 20,000 yuan in storage fees, 4,500 yuan in extra trucking charges, 4,200 yuan for masks and shipping. More than 300,000 yuan all in. Those three deals lost money, but of the three customers, we did not lose one.

When you do business long enough, the final ledger is not whether one deal lost US$38,000; it is whether you treated your customers as human beings during those twenty-three days. Paying the penalties in full and mailing the masks anyway: those two things do not contradict each other.