'Happened rapidly': How a single Covid case rocked world's biggest carmaker

Toyota slashes output in September by 40%: a fallout of a series of disruptions that started when a worker at a supplier's plant in Vietnam tested positive for Covid.

Early last month at a sprawling factory on the highway connecting Hanoi to the port city of Haiphong, a single worker tested positive for Covid-19. The delta variant was spreading swiftly through the Southeast Asian nation at the time, and on Aug. 4, provincial officials suspended work at the auto-parts manufacturer.

An ocean away, Toyota Motor Corp. Chief Purchasing Group Officer Kazunari Kumakura was watching intently. The plant is operated by a key Toyota supplier and is one of Vietnam’s biggest assemblers of wire harnesses--a basic but essential yoke for cables that holds the inner workings of an automobile together. As