Chinese New Year and Summer Peaks: Planning Around Our Calendar

Every sourcing discussion starts with unit price. Very few start with the calendar, which is strange, because a missed delivery costs far more than a few cents per bottle. In China, packaging capacity is not evenly distributed across the year. There are four windows when it tightens sharply — and all four are predictable years in advance.

Window 1: Chinese New Year

This is the big one, and it is larger than the official holiday suggests. The statutory break is around eight days. The actual disruption runs five to six weeks.

Upcoming dates to work from:

Note that 2028 is almost two weeks earlier than 2027. If you plan your year by "last year we ordered in December", the 2028 cycle will catch you out.

Window 2: Summer Power Curbs

Guangdong summers push the grid to its limit, and provincial policy occasionally restricts industrial electricity use. Blow moulding is energy-intensive — extruders and chillers run continuously — so a curb hits our output directly.

In practice this shows up as scheduled downtime rather than a full stop, and it is usually announced with little notice. Orders placed for July and August delivery should carry a buffer of two to three weeks.

Window 3: Typhoon Season

Shantou sits on the South China coast. Typhoon season runs roughly July to September. Ports in the region — Shantou, Shenzhen, Xiamen — close for one to three days during a direct hit, and vessel schedules take about a week to recover.

Direct production risk is modest: we batten down and lose a day or two. The risk that matters is at the port, and it is entirely outside anyone's control. Build a week of slack into any shipment booked between July and September.

Window 4: The Post-Holiday Rebound

The weeks immediately after Chinese New Year are the least intuitive bottleneck of the year. Plants are open, workers are back, and it still takes longer than you expect — because every order that was deferred in the previous six weeks now arrives at once. February and March are often the hardest months to get a new mould started.

If your project involves a new tool, start it before the holiday, not after.

The Order-By Calendar, Condensed

What We Cannot Fix

Being honest about the boundaries is more useful than promising the impossible.

• We cannot compress Chinese New Year. Two hundred million people travel. No plant in China stays open through it.
• We cannot stop a typhoon. We can pre-book earlier sailings and stage goods at the port, and we do.
• We cannot conjure resin. If a resin grade goes short globally, as PCR grades periodically do, everyone waits. The buffer you build into your own planning is the only real protection.

A Practical Rhythm

Most of our long-standing customers settle into an annual pattern without ever writing it down:

• March–April: place the year's main order, including any new mould project.
• May–June: take the bulk of the volume; this is the year's cheapest and fastest window.
• July–August: move to safety stock; keep new projects off the calendar.
• September–October: second production run, ahead of the holiday squeeze.
• November–December: only top-ups and urgent repeats. Nothing new.

It is not glamorous, and it is the difference between a supply chain that runs and one that surprises you twice a year.