Chinese New Years Wreaks Havoc for E-Reader Industry

Chinese New Years traditionally starts in February, but in 2023 it starts on January 22nd. Due to COVID, this year the holiday starts on January 22nd and stretches until February 2nd. This means that all of the factories and companies that manufacture and produce e-readers will be closed. Not to mention over the course of the past four months there has been an exodus of employees from all of the major factories, so they were already operating at 20% capacity and this won’t change once Chinese New Years is over.

Good e-Reader has heard from all of major suppliers, that orders and payment has to be done by January 12th, in order for all of the current supply in warehouses to be shipped out to international distributors. No new production batches will occur until after the New Years holiday. This means that there might be a shortage of e-readers and e-notes, since there will be a 22 day window, in which no more units will be produced, nor will existing orders be fulfilled.

The e-Reader industry is powered by China. E INKS largest factory is in China, so no more panels will be made until after the holiday. Foxconn which produces the Amazon Kindle, and Netronix which makes Barnes and Noble Nooks and Kobo e-readers are all affected. Smaller players such as Pocketbook, Onyx Boox, the company formerly known as Boyue, Supernote, Remarkable will also unable to have any new production runs.

Chinese companies that have their own websites or e-commerce platforms that sell e-readers and e-notes directly to customers will also be unable to ship out any orders from January 22nd to Feb 2nd. The same goes for their official channels that also sell devices on 3rd party e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, JD, Alibaba and others.

It is not all bad news, the industry has been preparing for the early holiday for the past two months, so all of the major players have enough supply at their warehouses to fulfill existing or new orders. Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo have enough cash on hand, that they have an ample supply. The worst hit will be distributors that resell products, such as those found on Amazon, JD, Aliexpress and Good e-Reader.

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