Covid lockdown and business

COVID-19 also called coronavirus has affected dramatically peoples’ lives, brought chaos and fear to many families. This situation is really terrible as in addition to terrible catastrophe for human beings COVID-19 impacted practically every sphere  and industry not only on the local level, but globally. Already the numbers are high, and we should take into account that pandemic is progressing and only China seems near to be a so-called post coronavirus country. All other countries, especially USA and Italy at the moment have numbers of cases increasing drastically every day.

Being invited to participate in IAOP webinar on the 25th of March with an opportunity in one hour to discuss general impact on main global industries our team decided to share our vision with our readers. This article will be mostly dedicated to the general overview of global industries, and after we will publish one more article where we will describe our vision how COVID-19 impacted and continues affecting outsourcing community globally.

Industries we will go through in today’s article are:

•  Banking
•  Finance
•  Insurance
•  Energy and resources
•  Media and entertainment
•  Public sector
•  Retail
•  Manufacturing
•  Travel and transportation
•  Healthcare
•  High-tech and telecommunications

BANKING, INSURANCE AND FINANCE

Mostly because of quarantine in the majority of countries bank offices are closed and the workforce is reduced, however, the demand to leverage technology is huge. Now, more than before people “obliged” to sit at home, will discover new options with online banking, payments. New banking systems have great chance to come to the market and to present to its users new product and solutions.

Regarding consumers, desire for digital banking for sure increased. Insurance sphere seems to suffer from event cancellation polices, but the demand in virtual agents and chat bots has increased at the same time.

ENERGY AND RESOURCES

This sphere, as well as retail and traveling niche has been impacted badly, more severe than most of other industries. Not going too much into details, we will just outline that working in this sphere requires employees who do not work from home, and preventive measures has caused difficulties. As well as closed boarders and economic negotiations show and prove how terrible things have changed even if we will compare it with the reality of 3-4 weeks ago.

MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT

Most of people will say that this niche has a great boost today, because people have nothing to do sitting at home, and so they are watching TV and buy paid subscriptions and so on. If we speak about home entertainment – than yes, it is true, however, industry of media and entertainment is not only that. Theaters and cinemas are closed, exhibitions as well. If we think of sports – as well we will notice that sports leagues and events are suspended and it really affects badly the industry in general.

PUBLIC SECTOR

Government, economy and education all these can be included to the public sector. Schools and universities are closed. In most countries there are still courses via different means of internet. However, students are not used to this as well as teachers.

The positive impact is shown in purchases of different online courses, and platforms for education. Most of people try not to waste time staying at home.

Different political events are on-hold, even political campaigns in the USA are closed. Government is also trying to maintain economy, this could be noticed in many countries in the form of tax breaks, fiscal packages to help people and so on.

RETAIL

Retail sector is impacted terribly, online retail is still in progress, however, most of the shops are closed and online markets such as Amazon and Ebay have problems brining goods. For sure the demand in grocery shops and drug retails increased, but as TV shows in most of the groceries there are no more products, as now it is complicated to bring them as well.

MANUFACTURING

As it is not a sphere where employees can work at home – it goes without saying the impact on manufacturing is severe. And even when things will get better finally the majority of manufacturers won’t be able to start fast because of logistic constrains which will be slow to return to normal.

TRAVEL AND TRANSPORTATION

Travel has always been the best way of relaxing, making business, spending time, dreaming, visiting relatives for the majority of people on the globe. People arriving from dangerous countries were quarantined, even cruise ships have been quarantined in ports. To make the long story short – let’s just move to numbers. $113 billion of loss revenue globally and numbers just continue to grow.

HEALTHCARE

People working whole days to save lives are “soldiers of nowadays” fighting for the life of every patient from one side. And on the other side major pharma are under pressure to find new vaccine  as well as  to produce faster test kits. Increased demand for hospitals, the fact that majority of countries were not prepared to get so many people with pandemic symptoms at a time.

HIGH TECH AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS

To begin with postponed tech conferences or those which were moved online. As practice showed the results of online conferences couldn’t be estimated as productive as previous live meetings. Postponed tech conferences and events which were moved to online resulted in losses of millions to vendors and companies.

From the other hand, online publishers and broadcasters got more traffic and the online realm benefited from the pandemic situation.

Most people say that the necessity to move everything to digital increases demand in outsourcing. However, at the same time providers and those who hire outsourcing companies in the majority of industries suffer from pandemic situation. Being a part of an outsourcing global community, we will express our vision on the impact of COVID-19 on the outsourcing in our next article.