(Yicai) Nov. 2 -- Tsingtao Brewery, one of China’s biggest beer makers, has apologized after a police investigation found out that the person who appeared to urinate in a malt container in a recent viral video was an employee of a third-party supplier.

The incident reflects Tsingtao’s loopholes in terms of raw material transport and management, the Qingdao-based firm said yesterday. Tsingtao will replace its raw material transport vehicles with hermetic ones that can be unloaded automatically, upgrade its in-factory monitoring systems with artificial intelligence to be able to recognize workers’ actions, tighten the management of outsourced employees, and derelict the relevant executives involved in the probe.

The worker in the video, surnamed Cui, is a cargo handler hired by Qingdao Zhihe Trading, which provides outsourcing services to Tsingtao, according to the results of the probe released yesterday by Pingdu, a county-level city under the administration of Qingdao, where Tsingtao’s third factory is located. Due to a quarrel with a truck driver surnamed Cai during work, Cui urinated in Cai’s box truck after his shift was over, the results also showed.

All batches of malt involved in the incident have been sealed, and Cui has been administratively detained for violating China’s Law on Penalties for Administration of Public Security, the Pingdu police noted.

The video clip that began circulating online on Oct. 19 shows a man in a work uniform climbing into a large container of malt and then peeing inside. Some media reports said the warehouse in the video is at Tsingtao’s third plant in Qingdao, which has an annual production capacity of 1.2 million kiloliters of beer.

Tsingtao’s third plant is one of the company’s biggest production bases in China. After the release of the probe’s results, multiple beer industry insiders declined to comment on the incident, claiming that it would also be hard to judge the incident’s impact on Tsingtao’s market performance.

The Shanghai-traded shares of Tsingtao [SHA: 600600] were trading down 2 percent at CNY81.03 (USD11.07) as of 11.20 a.m. today.

Editor: Futura Costaglione