<Anchor>

Friendly economy, Kwon Ae-ri reporter is out today (26th). If you look at reporter Kwon and reporter Han Sang-woo a while ago. There are still many people waiting in line for a few hours to buy 10 masks and 30 masks.

<Reporter>

Yes. It started to run from 0 o'clock today. Starting today, manufacturers of health masks in Korea are required to send half of their production to public dealers.

Where is the official sales office? Hanaro Mart, NACF, and the public home shopping channel and SME distribution center operated to secure distribution networks for SMEs.

In the future, additional distributors may be added as determined by the Food and Drug Administration. Korea's mask production is now 12 million a day, more than double that before this incident.

So, starting today, about 6 million masks are released to the post office, Hanaro Mart and other public retailers every day.

Such as limiting the number of sets you can buy per person will determine how these public vendors work. The Korea Post is planning to start selling masks through the post office shopping mall.

Currently, the company plans to secure 120 to 1.5 million pieces of daily production, which is about 10% of the daily output of domestic production.

Not only the postal offices, but also the public sales offices that are in charge of sales need to be agile from this basic part of server management.

Mask prices for public retailers have not yet been finalized, but they are now around $ 4,500 per sheet online. Even more expensive ones are seen.

That's about 10 times as high as before Corona 19, but the authorities expect it to be much cheaper.

<Anchor>

If you think that you have suffered from buying masks in the meantime, you're not feeling late.

<Reporter>

Yes. Distributors, in principle, cannot export masks. Mask producers, so only manufacturers can export.

This is also allowed to export only 10% of the daily output. If you're not a mask manufacturer, you can only bring your products abroad in less than 300 a day.

The notice that prevents mask hoarding has been in effect since the 5th, and similar measures are taken for a limited time until April 30th.

I don't think the mask situation is just left to the market to smooth supply and demand. In such cases, these measures are implemented in accordance with the Price Stabilization Act, which allows the government to control production and distribution.

<Anchor>

Exports are likely to change, but so far, much of the increase in output has gone to China or abroad.

<Reporter>

Yes. It looks like that. The screen you will see now is the Import and Export Trade Statistics page of the Korea Customs Service. It is the import and export volume of textile textile products including health masks.

Since May last year, we have been collecting monthly statistics. Total exports are around 300 tons per month, about $ 6 million.

The level of around 7.2 billion won is maintained similarly every month until December last year, but suddenly jumps more than 10 times by January.

Import volume remains the same. This is an item that originally contains things like textiles, so the amount of imports is much higher than that of exports.

But suddenly this year, it turns into a big difference. It is a sudden change that cannot be explained without the surge in exports of masks included here.

Especially until now, I've been looking at the whole. Exports to China have jumped more than 100 times in value, as you can see now.

Exports to China, which accounted for less than 10% of the total export volume by December last year, suddenly rose to 84% of the total.

In fact, the mask is estimated to account for almost all of this rapid increase. In addition, it is estimated that a small amount of exports or illegal exports that were not caught by this statistic were quite good.

The Customs Office cracked down on illegal exports earlier this month, when 730,000 copies of the incident were discovered in just one week.

In fact, domestic mask production capacity is still considerable. The demand is soaring and it's cracking down, but the hoarding business has increased, and suddenly the demand in China has also surged.

It is a situation that masks produced every day are not brought to consumers properly due to various factors.

Nowadays, at least 20% of domestically produced masks are considered to have gone overseas, which means that they will be limited to up to 10%.

Of course, quantity management. The sales management of the public distributors is well done, so the mask of reasonable price should be supplied smoothly as soon as possible.