How much can we buy?

Anneliese Bischof was on a business trip in Thailand in the second week of January when conversations with Chinese colleagues about a new virus spreading across the region made her realize a major outbreak might be occurring.

- Andrew Noel, with Gerald Porter Jr. and Thomas Buckley

For Bischof, the business director of disinfection at German chemicals company Lanxess AG, this was initially no cause for alarm. After all, she and her team had seen spikes in viral infections before, like the African swine fever that swept across the Asia-Pacific region last year, driving up demand for the company’s Virkon industrial-strength disinfectant.

It was only when Bischof returned to Germany that she realized this time was different. Back home in Cologne, the phones in her department started ringing off the hook. The inquiries were from nations that had never previously been on the Lanxess corporate map. “We had an off-the-charts number of calls coming in,” says Bischof, who works at the company’s Material Protection unit, which took over the Virkon brand of disinfectants a few years ago with the $230 million purchase of a biocide business from Delaware-based Chemours Co. “Places like Trinidad and Tobago, all kinds of small countries that for the majority of our business wouldn’t have been on our radar. That’s when we really started noticing the bomb dropping.”