Flexibility and automation will be the key words for the POST-COVID business era and those having these capabilities will be the winners

Mihai-Alexandru Cristea 29/04/2020 | 17:18

This crisis will bring some huge changes. Few industries will come out without being reformed, restructured or eliminated. Flexibility and automation will be the key words for the POST-COVID business era and those having these capabilities will be the winners.

 

Valentin Ionescu- ASF, – Conference “The Post-Pandemic World”

 

Today’s crisis erases the old inefficient business models whose usefulness has already expired. The creative destruction that the crisis will trigger will ultimately provide huge opportunities for innovation and dynamic productivity improvements, as long as resources from inefficient or bankrupt businesses are effectively reallocated.

COVID-19 will force a revival of many industries, as everyone stays at home in isolation, re-evaluating and re-shaping the ways of consumption, supply, interaction and productivity. Paradoxically, thanks to technology, people are much better connected today than ever before, even in their physical isolation.

At the same time, on the positive side, the creative destruction that the crisis will trigger will ultimately provide huge opportunities for innovation and dynamic productivity improvements, as long as the resources from inefficient or bankrupt enterprises will be reallocated to more promising purposes.

The effects of the COVID-19 crisis will reverberate in our society and economy in the coming years and will transform the way the world operates in the future. Developments that would normally take place over  years will now be compacted in a few months.

Private companies seeking capital: valuations will fall, shareholders and management should expect investors to apply much more demanding valuation models and money will not flow as freely as in the past.

While the last decade has belonged to disruptive, consumer-oriented businesses that have redefined the relationship with brands, the next decade will belong to those who rethink the role of human contact in transactions and prioritize efficiency, adaptability and sustainability.

In the current environment, we have seen that e-commerce businesses appear as winners, but also traditional businesses have had the opportunity to expand their online operations. The opportunities that these companies bring to consumers, including groups that have adopted digital transactions more slowly, will become the new normal.

It will be vital for companies to continue to consider the new behaviours and consumer expectations that will emerge from this pandemic. An example in this sense is the massive transition from events and meetings in person to software that allows the organization of online conferences. In many cases, these are not just short-term survival tactics, but new behaviours that are appreciated by many people for their effectiveness. Thus, they will become the new social norms that will also be in the attention of investors.

No doubt, new companies will appear on the market offering new and niche technologies that fit the new social norms: work from home, remote access, new security and health measures, telemedicine, contactless payments and transactions, virtual showrooms of all kinds, potential virtual journeys.

The economic system that will be built after this pandemic will have to be less visible, more resilient and more attentive to the fact that economic globalization has far surpassed political globalization. As long as this is true, countries will have to work to strike a better balance between taking advantage of globalization and relying more on their own powers.

And last but not least, change must be based on the principle of evolution and not of revolution.

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