The pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant.
The pandemic’s most enduring impact will be as an accelerant.
In any crisis there is opportunity.
The greater & more disruptive the crisis, the greater the opportunities.
The following quote sums up the global pandemic perfectly….. “Nothing can happen for decades & then decades can happen in weeks”
This theme, decades in weeks is playing out in most sectors & facets of life.
E-commerce began taking root in 2000. Since then it’s share of retail has grown approximately 1% each year.
At the start of 2020 E-commerce = 16% of total retail. Fast-forward to 8 weeks after the pandemic started in the US, it had leapt to 27%.
We registered a decade of E-commerce growth in 8 weeks.
For decades, companies invested millions of dollars in equipment for virtual meetings hoping to diminish distance.
And for decades, not much happened. Multi-million dollar video conferencing systems didn’t work & many resisted any tech more complex than powerpoint.
Facetime & skype made inroads in our personal communications, but didn’t reach critical mass.
Then in weeks, our lives moved online & business went remote.
Every business meeting went virtual, every teacher became an online educator and social gatherings moved to a screen.
In the markets, investors calibrated the value of disruptive companies based not on the next week or quarter or even year, but on the firm’s position in 2030 (a decade away).
“Nothing can happen for decades & then decades can happen in weeks”
It took Apple 42 years to reach $1 trillion in value & 20 weeks to accelerate from $1 trillion to $2 trillion (March to August 2020).
In the USA it took 10 years to create 20 million jobs & only took 10 weeks to destroy 40 million.