Are there listed companies that stand to benefit from the spread of the coronavirus?
I've answered this on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-listed-companies-that-stand-to-benefit-from-the-spread-of-the-coronavirus
John Arnold (name changed), a manager of 3M’s respirator mask factory in Aberdeen, South Dakota, got a call from his headquarters. He gathered about 20 managers and supervisors in a conference room. Rehder told them that a new virus was spreading rapidly in China and that 3M was expecting demand for protective gear to jump. Production was already ramped up given the Australian wildfires and a volcano eruption in the Philipines.
3M is prepared. 3M had been preparing for this moment for the last two decades and right now is their moment to shine. And I think they will. The company had a humiliating time during the 2002 SARS outbreak where they were unable to manufacture masks, gloves and other protective great on time leading to a lot of deaths. Since then, the company had kept extra machinery on standby for demand surges like this. 3M plans to manufacture 2 billion masks this year
3M makes the Rolls Royce of masks. 3M makes about two dozen versions of the N95, for different industrial and medical purposes. Generally, they’re constructed from nonwoven materials—infinitesimal plastic strands are blown together to form a random thicket that, under a microscope. The filters can block invaders as small as 0.3 microns, or about 1/100th the thickness of a human hair. The virus is smaller than that, at about 0.125 microns, but it often travels within larger particles when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
3M has a built-in advantage. Unlike many companies that have moved production to low-cost countries, 3M sources the materials for its respirators near its assembly plants and serves customers reasonably close by. They make respirators in China for the Chinese market, respirators in Korea for a little more than the Korean market. Each plant can ship respirators anywhere—pretty important in a pandemic— but day to day, a plant doesn’t rely on distant vendors subject to tariffs or export bans. They have essentially de-risked their supply chain.