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Billionaires Making ‘Boatloads Of Money’ From Once-Cheap Medical Gloves

In the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, doomsday headlines warned of impending shortages of ventilators for severely ill patients. Then states scrambled to source masks and gowns as borders quickly shut, igniting a bidding war for personal protective equipment. Eventually, domestic production kicked in to save the day, churning out everything from respirators to face shields. But one item in particular is still in critical shortage as the pandemic lurches into its second year: medical gloves.

Nitrile gloves, preferred by hospitals for their hypoallergenic and chemical-resistant properties, are now increasingly expensive and difficult to source at any price. In the U.S., the national stockpile reported in December that there were only 72 million gloves on hand out of a target of 4.5 billion, forcing individual states to navigate a wild market rife with shadowy middlemen and black-market brokers, some outright frauds. The surging demand has sent prices skyrocketing: A box of 100 nitrile gloves now costs as much as $32, up from around $3 pre-pandemic, according to Singapore-based Persistence Market Research. The frenzy has minted at least five new medical glove billionaires and centimillionaires: Stanley Thai ($1.5 billion, Malaysia), Lim Kuang Sia ($1.2 billion, Malaysia), Wong Teek Son ($810 million, Malaysia), Somwang Sincharoenkul ($730 million, Thailand) and Wieslaw Zyznowski ($670 million, Poland).

"At this point there isn't even a pretense of passing this on because costs are going up,” says Bruce Levitt, the CEO of Levitt-Safety, a Canadian safety equipment supplier that distributes gloves in North America. “It's just a matter that the gloves manufacturers have said, 'this is our opportunity to make boatloads of money.’”

According to U.S. importer AmerCareRoyal and market analysts, the global demand for gloves nearly doubled in a matter of months from 300 billion pieces in 2019 to 585 billion in August 2020. But glove makers can only produce 370 billion a year — and while new capacity installed in 2021 will add about 50 billion more, that still leaves a shortfall of 165 billion gloves as the pandemic rages.

Benefiting the most are the Malaysian glove producers who together control nearly 60% of the North American market. Top Glove, the world’s largest maker of gloves, posted record revenues of $1.8 billion in 2020, up 51% from a year earlier, more than tripling the net worth of its billionaire founder Lim Wee Chai to $4.1 billion. The mania has also generated new fortunes in unlikely places: In Poland, Wieslaw Zyznowski, a 56-year-old mild-mannered philosophy PhD, is now worth $670 million. Shares in his Warsaw-listed glove manufacturer Mercator Medical, which makes its gloves in Thailand, are up 3,300% since January 2020.

“We believe the demand will increase tremendously even after the pandemic disappears,” says Zyznowski, somewhat hopefully, “because billions of people became aware of the need for gloves.”

Thanks to cheap labor and a quirk of geography — natural rubber and the chemicals that make synthetic rubbers like nitrile are mainly produced in Asia — the glove market is dominated by companies in Southeast Asia. That means it’s nearly impossible for countries outside the region to make enough gloves domestically, as they did for masks and gowns. In the U.S. the Biden administration aims to produce more than one billion gloves a month by the end of 2021, but that will only satisfy half of domestic demand. And almost no one, from market analysts to health officials, expects the madness to end anytime soon: prices are still rising in 2021 even with vaccination campaigns underway around the world.

"Every single month, the price of gloves has gone up. It’s a nice money-making opportunity if you’re a manufacturer,” says Levitt.

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