Hong Kong February 10, 2020 – APRIL International Care has opened up its TeleHEALTH service to all individual and group clients across its Asian region to provide support for clients during the current Coronavirus outbreak.

SHANGHAI—In a nation unaccustomed to widespread working from home, China’s coronavirus outbreak is forcing millions of white-collar workers to get used to business outside the office.

With millions of companies keeping staff away to curb contagion, demand is surging for chat apps that employees are adjusting to use from living rooms, kitchens and home offices.

“When we did our first video call on Monday, some people looked like they just got out of bed,” said Jingshu Chen, who runs virtual reality startup VeeR, which asked its staff to stay away from their Beijing office for the week.

“Then, when we did a video call on the second day, everyone looked ready to work.”

Provinces across China have ordered companies to shut or make staff work from home for at least another week after the Lunar New Year holiday. Many firms may extend that further.

The work-from-home policies have led to a surge in downloads for WeChat Enterprise, DingTalk, and Lark—three workplace chat apps operated by Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance respectively.

According to data from research firm App Annie, both DingTalk and Lark saw downloads across China’s app stores surge over 350 percent during Chinese New Year week compared to one week prior.

Downloads for WeChat Work surged by almost 70 percent in the same time.

Both DingTalk and WeChat Work suffered connectivity issues due to heavy usages, the companies confirmed in public statements addressing user complaints.

Couriers and Round-the-Clock

Companies are also relying more on China’s army of couriers, who are keeping many self-quarantined residents fed and supplied. VeeR’s Chen said large video files that her team once accessed on an office network are now delivered to employees’ homes via hard drives with couriers.

Some fear financial disruptions.

John Rood, who runs a digital marketing agency in Shenzhen, said the nationwide work-from-home experiment could cause late payments from clients due to banking system quirks.

“A lot of Chinese banks require you to use a USB drive to log into your account, for security measures,” he said.

“But…

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SHANGHAI/BEIJING—The coronavirus is threatening to disrupt large parts of China’s manufacturing machine and its global supply chains as the spread of infection and strict public health measures force companies and workers to remain idle.

China’s most important holiday was due to end on Jan. 31, when many companies planned to get back to work after a week-long vacation, but authorities have ordered businesses in many areas to stay shut longer in a bid to contain the disease.

Widespread travel restrictions, meanwhile, mean millions of migrant workers may be unable to return to what has often been called the world’s factory floor.

The World Health Organization on Thursday declared the outbreak a global health emergency.

Brian Miller, 32, owner of Easy China Warehouse and a bluetooth speaker company in the southern city of Shenzhen, said labor and production disruptions could ripple through supply chains, from raw materials to final assembly.

“If we can’t get back to production quick enough, I’ll run out of inventory, and I’ll have a few months where we won’t be able to sell anything. And that’s the catastrophe that we all don’t want,” Miller told Reuters.

In Eastern China’s Suzhou, one of the country’s largest manufacturing hubs, companies have been told to stay shut until at least Feb. 8 and in Shanghai until Feb. 9. Factories in the southern manufacturing hub of Dongguan in export-oriented Guangdong Province have also been told not to open before Feb. 10.

The threat of significant disruptions comes as China was already undergoing the biggest supply chain shift in a generation as companies grappled with the impact of the Sino-U.S. trade war and an economic slowdown.

A woman surnamed Chen, who co-owns a garment factory in Huizhou in Guangdong Province, described the virus and shutdowns as being like “frost on top of snowfall.”

Her domestic focused factory already had to lay off almost half its workers from over 70 to around 40 due to the slowing economy, and she fears more jobs may be lost in coming months.

“The outbreak is definitely causing great damage to our…

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