Virus-Hit Firm Tells Staff: Welcome Back and Wash Your Hands

(Bloomberg) -- After two weeks stuck at home as their company endured Germany’s largest outbreak of the new coronavirus, hundreds of Webasto SE employees returned to headquarters Wednesday and were greeted with two signs.

“Welcome back!” said one, while the other offered hygiene tips.

The family-owned car-parts supplier, located a half hour south of Munich, has been thrust onto the world stage after nine employees in Germany and some of their family members contracted the virus.

Webasto’s disruption shows what other employers are trying to avoid. Many have stopped workers from traveling to and from China, where an outbreak that has infected about 45,000 people worldwide began, while others cancel visits to trade shows or order employees to telecommute.

“This has been a big burden on our workers and their families,” Chief Executive Officer Holger Engelmann told reporters and employees as he stood in the entryway of the headquarters, a $44 million facility that opened in 2018. “Now we have to look forward and slowly get back to the day-to-day business.”

Biggest Market

That’ll take time. Since Webasto entered China in 2001, the Asian country has grown into the largest single market for the 120-year-old business. The company, which specializes in automotive roof and heating systems as well as electric-car batteries and chargers, generated more than one-third of its 3.4 billion euros ($3.7 billion) of global sales for 2018 in China. It employed 3,500 of its 13,000 workers there that year.

Webasto customers include Ford Motor Co., Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG. Last year, Engelmann told Automotive News that he hoped to reach 5 billion euros in global sales by 2020.

While fallout from the temporary headquarters closure may be manageable, the lost business in China may be hard to recoup. It’s too early to tell how much sales will suffer there, because it’s unclear how long quarantined regions will stay cut off, Engelmann said.

“That’ll have a big influence not just on Webasto, but the whole German industry,” he said.

Webasto’s crisis started in January, only days after it celebrated opening its 11th factory in China, a 36,000 square-meter (390,000 square-foot) site south of Shanghai.

On Jan. 20, a Chinese employee from Shanghai visited the headquarters in Stockdorf, Germany, without realizing she was sick. After attending several meetings, she woke around midnight feeling slightly warm, but not feverish, according to medical researchers who interviewed her. She experienced minor pain and fatigue on Jan. 21, which she attributed to jet lag.

China Return

The following day, the woman felt slightly cold before flying out of Munich that night. The first time she realized she was sick was the evening of Jan. 23 when she was back in China, the researchers wrote. Webasto said another Chinese employee who visited Germany also tested positive.

Within days, workers at the company in Germany started getting sick, too, in what remains one of the largest reported clusters of cases caused by human-to-human spread outside China -- as well as a flashpoint in the debate about how early people can pass on the disease.

Faced with the news, Engelmann told his German staff on Jan. 28 that they were free to work from home before later that day closing the headquarters for five days. He later extended the shutdown to a full two weeks -- which experts believe is the incubation period of the disease -- until it reopened Wednesday.

So far, more than 200 Webasto employees have been tested for the virus, Engelmann said. Several family members of the infected workers have caught the illness. A small number of other employees are still being quarantined at their homes.

Webasto staffers have faced some backlash in their communities. Some of their spouses have been sent home from their own jobs, while a few of their children haven’t been allowed to go to school, a Webasto spokeswoman said. One worker couldn’t even get his car fixed, because a local repair shop was too nervous that he works for the company, the spokeswoman said.

Back to Work

On Feb. 4, a small team of 20 Webasto workers were allowed to return to the headquarters on a voluntary basis, after consultation with employee representatives and local health authorities, the company said. Their work includes testing car-roof systems, which couldn’t be done from home.

In the entryway to Webasto’s headquarters, a half-dozen products are on display, including a shiny retractable roof for the Mercedes-Benz GLE, a soft top for the Audi R8 Spyder and a new system for charging electric cars.

Some of the products are manufactured in China, including the virus epicenter of Wuhan, where Webasto in September opened a 50 million-euro location. On hand for the ribbon-cutting was Chancellor Angela Merkel. The facility is located in the heart of China’s quarantine efforts and Engelmann isn’t sure when it’ll get back up to speed.

On Wednesday, as the CEO dwelled on the economic fallout, he was confident of one thing, though. In recent days, Webasto hired a team of 50 cleaning specialists to disinfect the headquarters in Germany.

“I would say you’re in Webasto’s most germ-free location in the world,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Loh in Munich at tloh16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net, Anne Pollak

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