INTERVIEW
Masks, medical equipment, the airlift between France and China is operating at full capacity to deal with the coronavirus health crisis. Mask orders from Chinese producers already reached two billion copies on April 7, according to Minister of Health Olivier Véran, and must arrive in France by the end of June. Mathieu Friedberg, managing director of Ceva Logistics, (subsidiary of the company CMA CGM, present in 70 countries) has the task, with other actors, of establishing these air links. He describes on Europe 1 how this airlift works.
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International and exponential demand
"If we had to describe the operations more precisely, this consists of collecting the masks at the places of production in China, transporting them to Shanghai airport where we package them, we put them on Air France planes, with which we set up this logistics bridge, and on arrival at Charles de Gaulle, we clear customs in our warehouses and distribute to our final recipients, "summarizes the director.
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"From a logistical point of view it is not extremely complicated, these are emergency operations that can be done in other circumstances", assures Mathieu Friedberg. "What is a little new is the scale on the one hand, and its international side: French demand is not the only demand."
China must meet demands from all over the world, and ensure a phenomenal production capacity to meet all the requesting countries. "This is a transport capacity issue," says the director of Ceva Logistics. Thanks to the airline company Air France, France has a lot of transport capacity. "The bridge works in France, as it works in the United States or Latin America. It is now well established".
Secure the airlift
The challenge is constant: with the stopping of passenger planes, which provide 70% of the air transport capacity, the latter has been greatly reduced for exponential demand, but the main thing for the boss of Ceva Logistics is to secure the airlift. Operations have become more fluid, especially at the customs level. "I don't know if there were volume limits before, today there are none. We have absolutely no difficulty getting these masks in," added the director. "After customs duties exist, as on other goods, it is up to the public authorities to decide on this point what they want on these duties."
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Mathieu Friedberg also responds to rumors of masks from China directly bought on the tarmac of airports by foreign operators. According to him, this is impossible. "There has been some noise about these stories of masks being directly transferred to the tarmac, in a practical way it is impossible to transfer masks to a tarmac. Chinese airport security has control of the tarmac. there was a transaction, it was done upstream, with Chinese producers. "