San Miguel Corp. says its first 40,000 sets of protective gear arrived Wednesday on board a Boeing-777 plane from China.
The company says the supply is part of a P500-million fund it has earmarked to help increase supplies and to better equip Filipino medical frontliners in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
SMC president and chief operating officer Ramon Ang said the company chartered the aircraft from Philippine Airlines and filled it “to the brim” with personal protective equipment (PPEs) from suppliers in China. The equipment would be donated to various hospitals in Luzon where most of the COVID-19 cases had been reported.
The shipment consists of 40,000 hazmat suits and goggles to help boost the local supply of medical-grade PPEs. Local manufacturers are also working to ramp up production capacity.
“We are very fortunate to have been able to buy this much PPEs,” Ang said. Globally, demand is very high and many of the big countries want to buy them all. That is why when the opportunity to buy this much came, we grabbed it and chartered a large aircraft to bring the supplies home.”
SMC earlier announced it was buying the first 10,000 PPEs to be made by local garments manufacturers under the Confederation of Wearable Exporters of the Philippines (CONWEP). The group was tapped by the Trade and Health departments to reconfigure their operations and ramp up production of PPEs.
SMC plans to continue buying locally produced PPEs to donate to medical practitioners.
The Trade and Health departments are targeting 10,000 PPE coveralls per day from the members of CONWEP, which normally export garments to the top global brands.
The Health department and the Philippine General Hospital approved the design of the local PPEs to ensure they are “medical-grade,” and CONWEP has secured the suppliers of raw materials.
“We are hoping that with these developments, more doctors and nurses nationwide will have less worry about their safety and the availability of PPEs in the coming days and weeks,” Ang said.
“It is crucial that our medical frontliners have the protective equipment when they fight this virus, and we are glad to be contributing to our government’s efforts to address this issue.”
Apart from its P500-million fund to acquire PPEs, SMC has also donated more than P227 million in food products—including canned goods, meat and poultry products, rice, biscuits, coffee, dairy and flour to make bread—to the less fortunate communities during the Luzon-wide Enhanced Community Quarantine.
From Luzon, SMC’s food donations have started reaching provinces in the Visayas and Mindanao.
The company has also donated ethyl alcohol to hospitals, LGUs and vital installations nationwide. These are produced at all its liquor manufacturing plants all over the country.