Rising demand for gloves has given Malaysia two billionaires

While entrepreneurs in European countries are suffering losses due to the lockdown, Malaysia, which supplies about 65% of the world's latex gloves, has become a factory for the production of billionaires, writes Bloomberg. Now there are four of them in the country, and two of them fell into this category this year.

A surge in demand for gloves due to the coronavirus outbreak has seen protective stocks suddenly turn latex plantations in Southeast Asia into a get-rich-quick scheme. For example, Top Glove Corporation, the world's largest glove manufacturer, is up 223% in 2020. The shares of the company operating under its own Supermax brand have risen in price by almost five times (+394%), and Tai Kim Sim, who founded it in 1987, was the last to enter the cohort of billionaires.

For six months of the development of the pandemic in the world, wearing protective equipment has become the norm. Global demand for rubber gloves could rise 11% to 330 billion this year, two-thirds of which will come from Malaysia, the country's rubber glove manufacturers association estimates.

The Southeast Asian country became a glove-manufacturing giant in the 1980s when demand began to rise with the AIDS epidemic. Malaysian entrepreneurs began to open shops and glove factories due to low labor costs and rubber plantations available in the country.

Mask manufacturers have also become beneficiaries of the 2020 pandemic. So, one of the record holders for the growth of shares during the pandemic was the Japanese mask manufacturer Kawamoto. In just one day, January 23, the company's shares rose by 23.9%. Then from 23 to 31 January, the paper added another 247%. Despite the fact that most of the growth in quotations has already been won back, the company's growth over 4 months is still about 10%.

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