Coronavirus: with most flights grounded globally, freight capacity is a life and death matter for Johnson & Johnson-owned drugmaker

Hoarding has quickly become frowned upon as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc in the consumer market. But for supply-chain managers charged with making sure medicines reach patients amid rapidly shrinking aviation traffic, buying up freight capacity well in advance is a matter of life and death.

For Chris Ewer, head of supply chain, Asia-Pacific, at Janssen Pharmaceuticals, keeping a cool head and quickly working out distribution priorities was all that mattered in the past two months as the pandemic severely disrupted the global supply chain.

“We had to buy up and secure [freight] routes, especially for cold-chain products such as some for immunology and oncology patients that have to go via aircraft,” said Ewer, who is based in Singapore. “The storage facilities have to be controlled at between two and eight degrees Celsius.

“It is important that we continue to predict and simulate what’s needed. We are now telling our logistics partners a month or two ahead what we will need in terms of slots in their aircraft.”

With around 1,000 supply-chain management staff and US$4.6 billion in annual sales in Asia-Pacific, Belgian drugmaker Janssen is a unit of the world’s largest health care company, Johnson & Johnson, based in New Jersey, US.

Global passenger flights have been drastically cut in recent weeks as more countries imposed lockdowns and quarantine measures in an attempt to contain the rapidly spreading virus that has caused the worst public health crisis in a generation.

As of Sunday, Chinese airlines are now restricted to flying just one weekly route to one city per country, and to operating those flights at no more than 75 per cent capacity.