Every importer learns this once, usually expensively. An order placed in December for March stock arrives in May, and nobody did anything wrong — the factory simply closed, the staff went home across the country, and the production slot that looked comfortable on a spreadsheet fell on the wrong side of the single largest annual pause in Chinese manufacturing.
Chinese New Year falls on 6 February 2027. The useful thing to understand is that the holiday itself is the smallest part of the problem.
Why the disruption is six weeks, not one
Three separate effects stack up, and they are sequential rather than simultaneous.
Before: the wind-down. In the weeks before the holiday, factories are running flat out to clear committed orders and will not take on new work they cannot finish. Quality pressure rises precisely when throughput does — which is the period you least want your first production run to land in.
During: the closure. Factories shut, typically for one to several weeks depending on the region and the plant. Their own component suppliers shut too, which matters more than the assembly plant's own calendar.
After: the ramp. This is the part people underestimate. A great deal of the workforce travels home across the country, and not all of it comes back to the same employer. A factory returning with a fraction of its line staff takes weeks to reach full output, and the first orders out of the gate are the ones that were already queued.
And then there is the freight
Two freight squeezes bracket the holiday, and both are price events as well as capacity events.
Before: everyone in the world tries to get goods out of the door ahead of the closure. Space tightens and rates firm up, exactly when you are least able to wait for a cheaper sailing.
After: a backlog of finished goods clears at once, with ports and carriers working through a queue that built while the factories were shut. Transit times get less predictable, which is a problem if you have promised a delivery date on the strength of a normal lead time.
The timeline to work backwards from
For stock you need on the shelf in spring 2027, the deadlines are earlier than instinct suggests.
Now to November: finalise specification, samples and approvals. Anything still being argued about in December will not be made before the shutdown. If a product needs new tooling, a certification, a battery test summary or artwork sign-off, that work has to be finished now rather than scheduled.
November to early December: place the order and pay the deposit. A production slot is allocated when the deposit lands, not when the enquiry is sent.
December to mid-January: production, inspection and shipment. Build in the inspection rather than treating it as optional — defects found after the factory closes cannot be reworked until it reopens, and a container of unsellable stock will sit for six weeks.
Mid-January: goods need to be gone. Not finished — gone, with a booked sailing. 'Ready for collection' on the eve of a shutdown is the same as not made.
The mistakes that get made every year
Treating the holiday date as the deadline. It is the end of a six-week window, not the start of one.
Accepting a quoted lead time without asking the question. A factory quoting thirty days in January is quoting working days it may not have. Ask specifically: when do you close, when do you reopen, and where does my order sit in the queue when you do. A supplier who answers precisely is telling you something useful about how they run.
Skipping pre-shipment inspection to save days. The one period where an inspection genuinely pays for itself is the run-up to a shutdown, because there is no rework window on the other side.
Forgetting the component suppliers. An assembly plant that reopens promptly still cannot build if the firm making its housings, cells or PCBs is shut for another fortnight. Ask about the supply chain behind your supplier, not only about the factory you are talking to.
Letting a sample approval drift. A week lost in October is a week lost. A week lost in December costs six.
The buffer question
Most businesses carry too little stock across this window because holding inventory is expensive and the risk feels abstract in October. The honest way to size it is to ask what a six-week gap would cost: not just the margin on sales you cannot make, but the customers who go elsewhere and the retail or trade relationships that do not survive two consecutive failed deliveries.
Against that, the cost of carrying a few extra weeks of cover across February and March is usually modest. This is the one period of the year where the arithmetic reliably favours holding more.
How we handle it
We buy direct from factories across Asia for our own brands and for clients, which means the Chinese New Year calendar is part of our planning cycle rather than something that happens to us. We place orders against the shutdown rather than against a quoted lead time, confirm closure and reopening dates per factory rather than assuming a national one, and inspect before shipment rather than after.
If you are planning spring stock and are not certain the dates work, the time to look at it is now — once December arrives, the options are the ones you left yourself. Talk to us and we will work the timeline back from when you need the goods.