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How is Coronavirus affecting your business?

loop101

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What happens if a product manufactured in China is sneezed on by an infected person, then shrink-wrapped, and sent to America? If anyone ever gets infected this way, things will get really interesting.
 
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100ToOne

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That’s Obviously not true, globalism is not the founder of globalism. And actually its economy is getting smaller as a result of globalization.

U.S. Role In Global Economy Declines Nearly 50%

How do you figure the US is as dependent on China as China is on USA? USA is the customer, who also makes its own things, China is the factory who cannot buy everything it produces. Who needs who more?

Just like at trade as a percent of GDP in USA vs China.
Amazon, FB, Apple, Starbucks, Google, Mcdonalds, Kfc, pepsi, uber, GM, weapons etc. Etc. Etc.

I didn't say they're dependant on each other, but there is huge common interest between them, that's why they have huge trade between them.

Besides for every American worker, four Chinese workers are available for a fraction of the price.

So why would the U.S businessman make it in the US where the price would be much higher to the consumer?
 

Rivoli

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Amazon, FB, Apple, Starbucks, Google, Mcdonalds, Kfc, pepsi, uber, GM, weapons etc. Etc. Etc.

I didn't say they're dependant on each other, but there is huge common interest between them, that's why they have huge trade between them.

Besides for every American worker, four Chinese workers are available for a fraction of the price.

So why would the U.S businessman make it in the US where the price would be much higher to the consumer?

Because we’re Americans. Our government should be doing a larger part to protect American workers from racing to the bottom, but at least we factory owners can do our part.
 

Rivoli

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Remember more american factory jobs here, more higher wages, means more BUYERS for us
 
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Dianne Cohen

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Travel is restricted from the United States. Trade associations are stating that they are still holding trade shows but my guess is nobody will attend. I have heard from multiple factories that the Chinese new year production resumption is being delayed. Right now they are communicating it on a week to be week basis but I don’t think anybody knows for sure that the end is in sight.

FedEx and UPS are still delivering packages from mainland China to the United States.

There was a trade show here in Orlando, Florida last week and there was one very large booth. It was selling imports from China. Nobody...Nobody would go into the booth. Everyone was afraid.
 

Roger FS

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Remember Swine flu :D ?
Me neither...

I think its just the media blowing things out of proportion again.


I thought the same thing, another Swine Flu blowout.

That said, a relative forwarded me this article, the implications that the virus mortality may be far higher than the Chinese are letting on.
 

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Factories are starting to send longer lead time delay messages - what originally was rosy forecasts of resumption of production after Chinese New Year will now stretch into March. Traditionally, factories need to lure workers back with perks (great food) and competitive salaries. Now, in the high production cities, workers are not free to travel, not free to job shop, and in some cases not even free to leave their apartment homes. This is going to get much worse (for people AND products) before it gets much better.
 
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Vigilante

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I have a small shipment coming in from China. Anyone want to come here and check it in for me? Interesting that Fedex, UPS, EMS (USPS) are still shipping.

 

Rivoli

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Factories are starting to send longer lead time delay messages - what originally was rosy forecasts of resumption of production after Chinese New Year will now stretch into March. Traditionally, factories need to lure workers back with perks (great food) and competitive salaries. Now, in the high production cities, workers are not free to travel, not free to job shop, and in some cases not even free to leave their apartment homes. This is going to get much worse (for people AND products) before it gets much better.

I got a lot of messages from my suppliers around feb 1, all saying “the virus will be defeated, our government has the situation completely under control we will resume work feb 10”

i don’t know if they believe their government, or are just worried the CCP are reading their emails.
 

Kevin88660

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I got a lot of messages from my suppliers around feb 1, all saying “the virus will be defeated, our government has the situation completely under control we will resume work feb 10”

i don’t know if they believe their government, or are just worried the CCP are reading their emails.
They are more likely to worry about losing your business.
 
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Kevin88660

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Remember more american factory jobs here, more higher wages, means more BUYERS for us
But no one believes that the world works that way. Why not tell the consumers to buy the more expensively made in U.S. product so that the business owners MIGHT move the jobs back to U.S. and consumers will get a pay rise.
 

Sanj Modha

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This is a wake up call for everyone to buy AMERICAN

China is the enemy of the western manufacturing democracies.

im spending 50k on a mold with a US supplier for my glass jars and starting to look else where for the only other component I buy from China

Everyone says that until its time to pay up then they want cheap.
 

aminmo

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The coronavirus wiped out my dropshipping stores (my main source of income).

Thankfully, another fastlaner and I started up some new stores together (near the end of Jan) that ship out of the US. Been generating anywhere from $500 - $2k/day in sales ever since launch (with a consistent ROAS of over 4, anything over 1.5 is profit for us). We haven't even started scaling yet.

This coronavirus was basically a blessing in disguise. It got me off my a$$ and made me build legit businesses with this fastlane business parnter instead of relying on the horrible AliExpress dropshipping model.
 
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.B.

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You can tell this is much worse then is being reported because they built two HUGE hospitals working 24 hours a day in the month since this came out. I pay attention to actions, not the news, the fact that they emergently constructed 2600 new bed hospital there should alarm you. The Chinese government knows something they are not saying.

I also observe behaviour/actions rather than trust what people or governments say...
and I also think the actual situation is way worse than what is communicated.
Here are the observed facts and what we can deduce from them:

1) On 24/01 the Chinese government cancelled all New Year festivities and prohibited any public event.
Official number of deaths at that time: less than 30.

2) A couple of days later they decide to "build in 6 days a new hospital with 1.000 beds "
They already have many hospitals in Wuhan, but the purpose was that people infected with Coronavirus would go straight to the new hospital (a clever tactic to avoid spreading the virus to other patients in the existing hospitals)

More or less at that moment, Wuhan (a city of 10 million people) is put on lockdown.
Nobody could go in or out.

Official number of deaths at that time: less than 30.

3) A couple of days after the first decision to build a new hospital, they decide to build a second hospital with 1.500 beds!

=> Now we all know that Chinese people are very good at calculation, they worked hard at it.
So it is unlikely that they miscalculated the number of beds needed based on the initial data they had on the virus.
It is more likely that between those 2 decision dates, that is, in less than 3 days, their input data had changed a lot (e.g. the number of infected people, the speed with which the virus spreads, rate of death,...)

(Just by looking at the official numbers of deaths between 25/01 and 30/01 you could see that the number of deaths followed an exponential function, and you could already do a quick mental calculation and assume that if it continued with the same trend, they would go from 90 deaths to 1.000 deaths in the following 7 to 10 days, i.e. by 09/02, ...and they could reach several thousand deaths, maybe more than 10.000 before the end of February if no cure is found...)

4) 10 days after the beginning of the construction, the first hospital was finished! Pretty impressive.

Now what I find really scary:

When the 1st hospital was finished, the number of deaths had continued to follow its exponential trend (500 deaths on the 4th of February)
So they could have decided to build a 3rd hospital with the available workforce that had just finished the first hospital....
They could even have decided to build another 2 or 3 hospitals (come on it's China, they do have the resources and capacity to coordinate mass of workers and engineers...fast)

But instead, they decided to limit themselves to those 2 new hospitals.
And now they send people suspected to have coronavirus to the other existing hospitals in Wuhan (in contradiction to their first tactical decision...)
Although they know that it will accelerate the spread of the virus to other patients in those hospitals.

It seems they decided, that the contamination is so large and it spreads so fast that building thousands of beds won't change much...

So instead they decide to make the lockdown in Wuhan in tighter cells:
They went from a city-wide lockdown
To forbidding movement between neighbourhoods
And a few days later, people were asked to not leave their apartment buildings except to go buy food...

We can assume that the idea of having lockdowns on smaller cells is: if one cell is contaminated, we may lose a certain portion of its inhabitants, but the virus spread should be limited to that cell.

So the official communication may have been: "companies will not re-open before 17/02"...

But if we analyse the actions of their government:
Only 10 days after that they had reached 25 deaths, they calculated that it made more sense to focus on preventing the further spread of the disease than to build a few more hospitals that would only provide a few thousand beds more...
Even though they have the resources to build 2 hospitals with a total of 2.500 beds in less than 2 weeks!

They downplay the severity of the illness, saying there are good chances of survival. Yet they let their economy take a blow by keeping companies closed for a long period...

Additionally, I can guess that the Chinese government has many incentives to have reassuring communication with their citizen and with the rest of the world. (commercial reasons for one, maybe also for political reasons)

Indeed, I also prefer to observe the actions rather than the communication

And so yes, the situation is really sad for the people who have to live through that crisis and who are losing close relatives in dramatic circumstances...

And now it seems that they bleach the streets in Wuhan...:

When is the last time you heard a normal virus require such drastic measures?
If that virus is not an engineered bioweapon that went lose, it is a f... super bug for sure.

Now regarding the expected time before it all goes away in China:
In this cartoon for children (in Chinese and French), they seem to want to prepare kids to stay home or at least use masks for several months:
30390
30391
 
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.B.

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I thought the same thing, another Swine Flu blowout.

That said, a relative forwarded me this article, the implications that the virus mortality may be far higher than the Chinese are letting on.

I had skipped your article @Roger FS

Right now I just took the time to read the first paragraphs and the summary at the end of the article.
And it is already very interesting, scary and it is confirming my assumptions.

So comes the question:
Are the countries outside of China doing all they can to track down and monitor the health of all the people who came back from Wuhan in the last 2 months and who could carry the virus.
And ideally starting to track and monitor the people they came in contact with.

This is the only effective approach facing such a killer virus.
Especially when it seems that people that don't show symptoms can already contaminate others.

Think about it, once many citizens are infected, it will take another 3 to 4 weeks before those citizens reach the critical stage that requires them to go to a hospital. (2 weeks to show the symptoms, 1 to 2 weeks for the symptoms to become serious)

Which means that infected people spend another 3-4 weeks transmitting the disease around them, unaware, before they are diagnosed with that coronavirus...And the others will do the same, and the contamination will continue its exponential spread.

I know that in my country (Belgium) they don't take the appropriate proactive measures:

They only monitor the tip of the iceberg, and actually, the tip of the wrong Iceberg (they monitor the one infected person from the 15 Belgian citizens they brought back from Wuhan).
and they say in the news:
"IF you came back from China this month AND have flu symptoms, go straight to hospital St Pierre don't go to your general doctor"

And so all people that got contaminated by strangers that were close to them in the train, they will still go see their general doctor when they show the flu symptoms...And the doctor will not test them for Coronavirus based on the current procedure.

And so they overlook the monstrously bigger potential iceberg for Belgium and France: i.e.
France has historical and business ties with Wuhan:
french students go to study in Wuhan,
Businessmen go weekly to Wuhan then fly back to Paris.

Then those businessmen take the Thalys (the high-speed train) between Paris and Brussels and maybe they continue their high-speed train trip to London or Amsterdam...All business centers

Each of those hundreds or thousands of travellers that went to China risks to contaminate more travellers in Europe during that month before we start seeing the top of that huge iceberg surfacing, when too many of them end up at the hospital and die from pneumonia to be a coincidence...and during that time, the other unaware travellers will continue to spread the disease to exponentially more people...

I really hope I'm wrong.
We will see by mid-march, begin of April what the situation is like in Europe.
By then we should have a better idea of the situation.

And I really hope that I am wrong because I know that the Belgian government doesn't have the capacity nor the competence to coordinate lockdowns. Maybe the army does...
 
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.B.

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I thought the same thing, another Swine Flu blowout.

That said, a relative forwarded me this article, the implications that the virus mortality may be far higher than the Chinese are letting on.

I did a quick search before sending the article to my Chinese friend.

That article is published on naturalnews.com :

30394

Wikipedia says that NaturalNews spreads fake news:
Natural News - Wikipedia
30392

Of course, is everything they write fake news?
Or is it sometimes just not in line with mainstream news?

We cannot not know if that article specifically is fake news without investigating further.
But I spent enough time on this topic for today.

Whether the information in the article is close to the truth or not, does not change the fact that the behaviour of the Chinese government means that the problem is way worse than they say.
 
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Roger FS

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I did a quick search before sending the article to my Chinese friend.

That article is published on naturalnews.com :

View attachment 30394

Wikipedia says that NaturalNews spreads fake news:
Natural News - Wikipedia
View attachment 30392

Of course, is everything they write fake news?
Or is it sometimes just not in line with mainstream news?

We cannot not know if that article specifically is fake news without investigating further.
But I spent enough time on this topic for today.

Whether the information in the article is close to the truth or not, does not change the fact that the behaviour of the Chinese government means that the problem is way worse than they say.


Wikipedia is not a reliable source itself... even if you don't rely on this source website (Mercola.com), check out the numerous sources and references at this article when it comes to how Wikipedia is very agenda-driven and unreliable in many areas. ( Wikipedia is Stealing the News Part 1 ).
 

.B.

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Wikipedia is not a reliable source itself... even if you don't rely on this source website (Mercola.com), check out the numerous sources and references at this article when it comes to how Wikipedia is very agenda-driven and unreliable in many areas. ( Wikipedia is Stealing the News Part 1 ).

interesting article. Good to know. Thanks
 

.B.

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Wikipedia is not a reliable source itself... even if you don't rely on this source website (Mercola.com), check out the numerous sources and references at this article when it comes to how Wikipedia is very agenda-driven and unreliable in many areas. ( Wikipedia is Stealing the News Part 1 ).
And I didn't know that website: Mercola.com

You are right. And I like how he puts more than 50 references of sources used to write his article:
 
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Roger FS

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And I didn't know that website: Mercola.com

You are right. And I like how he puts more than 50 references of sources used to write his article:


I put in that disclaimer about Mercola.com because...ironically, wikipedia has a very low view of his website, as he does of theirs. Rather than just argue who's right, look to the source/reference information.

I have subscribed to Mercola's free health newsletter for about 20 yrs, the only thing I subscribed to anywhere near that long. Dr Mercola is always seeking to improve, and always willing to admit when he was wrong and/or found better information and changed his viewpoint. He was ahead of the curve of the importance of higher doses of D3, keto, etc. Even with an immune compromised family member, our family rarely gets colds, and I don't remember getting the flu in decades, largely because of following some basics (higher D3/K2 supplementation, minimal sugars/grains, etc) that Mercola has been recommending for many years.
 

.B.

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I put in that disclaimer about Mercola.com because...ironically, wikipedia has a very low view of his website, as he does of theirs. Rather than just argue who's right, look to the source/reference information.

I have subscribed to Mercola's free health newsletter for about 20 yrs, the only thing I subscribed to anywhere near that long. Dr Mercola is always seeking to improve, and always willing to admit when he was wrong and/or found better information and changed his viewpoint. He was ahead of the curve of the importance of higher doses of D3, keto, etc. Even with an immune compromised family member, our family rarely gets colds, and I don't remember getting the flu in decades, largely because of following some basics (higher D3/K2 supplementation, minimal sugars/grains, etc) that Mercola has been recommending for many years.

I added his website to my favorites because of his "about" page. Thanks.
 

Walter Hay

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IMPORTING HAS NOT BEEN KILLED BY CORONAVIRUS

I have received quite a few messages from people who have taken the advice that I have posted here for years, and more recently in my book: "Think globally. Don't buy from China, when there are many other countries where you can buy quality equal to or better than in China, at no higher cost."
See these posts: If you import from China, this may be relevant. and...
If you import from China, this may be relevant.


The current revision of my sourcing book addresses this issue in detail, with links to export B2B sites in 41 countries including China.

Now would be the time to source from one of those almost 40 countries other than China, and free yourself from the problems that buying from China are currently causing big losses.

I must add that searching those other sites outside of China will require more thought, more work, and more persistence, but isn't your business future worth it?

The people who have recently been writing to me are gleeful about the present situation. No problems importing, and no problems selling.

Walter
 
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