Production at JS was unfortunately interrupted by the Corona virus.
The South African Government has followed world best practises to slow down the spread of the COVID-19/Corona virus. At this moment there are more than a thousand cases of infection reported in South Africa, including five fatalities. Eight cases have been reported in the North West province.
As a result, the South African Government announced a twenty-one-day lockdown, effective from Thursday 26 March 23:59 PM. Within these regulations and restrictions all businesses (excluding essential products/services), have to send their employees home for this period, implying a loss of thirteen working days for JS’s manufacturing organisation.
Our engineering team may proceed working from home offices. This will allow our design team to complete the final outstanding work on the JS2, and give the certification compliance work a big push. It may even allow us to pull the certification schedule back – a critical requirement for our customers.
Management and other supporting staff are also working from home, and we will be able to proceed with administrative work, order specifications and also answer any questions (technical or non-technical). There will be no dispatch of spares for the next three weeks for the JS stores, but our business partner, M&D Flugzeugbau, does have stock of certain popular items.
Our Management team is working hard to manage the situation as best as possible and is taking all steps possible to ensure the security of your investment. We have taken the following decisions to ensure that JS will remain in a position to proceed with business as normal:
- Ensuring the safety of our employees and their families by fully complying with government’s restrictions, informing our employees and implementing actions to prevent the possible spread inside the company.
- Rescheduled production, in consultation with our employees, to make up for lost days.
- Production material and parts have been ordered timeously to prevent further delays.
- Cut expenses on all fronts, to ensure that cash available is only applied to add value and contracts with non-essential sub-contractors have been temporarily frozen.
- Large capital expenditure projects have been put on hold.
- Deposits have been kept in our EURO account to prevent the adverse effect of Rand/Euro fluctuations.
We do recognise that most of our customers are financially affected by Corona. As part of the plan to secure customer’s investment in JS, our board has placed a temporarily moratorium on the payback of deposits. JS will continue to honour the transfer deposits to new customers, should a cancellation be necessary.
We are also having great sympathy with our agents who are financially severely affected by Corona.
We are closely monitoring updates from the South African Government and National Department of Health, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the World Health Organization regarding COVID-19. We will continue to seek guidance from these agencies, public health officials and government agencies on an ongoing basis and will keep you informed on a regular basis.
