Читать книгу The New Normal in IT - Gregory S. Smith - Страница 41

Several companies in a variety of sectors did very well throughout the hardest hit portion of the Coronavirus pandemic between 2020 and 2021. With many indoor dining establishments closed due to state and local restrictions, food delivery services like Door Dash, Grub Hub, and Uber Eats, all gained a larger customer base during the pandemic.⁴¹ I personally witnessed fast-food restaurants doing well with car lines consistently high during meal times, especially for large chains like McDonalds, Chick-fil-A, Kentucky Fried Chicken/Yum brands, and others that operated through drive-through windows. Online retailers like Amazon and Walmart also did well during the pandemic as shoppers feared in-person store shopping during the height of the pandemic.⁴² Technology and online meeting vendors like Citrix, Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom did especially well as organizations flocked to tools for online meetings and remote access solutions for corporate staff.⁴³

 Chipotle digital sales “jumped 134 percent as customers order ahead through ‘Chipotlanes' which allow customers to pickup orders through drive through lanes.”⁴⁴ The company reported the following information:The chain opened 40 new locations in the recent quarter with more than 50 percent of the new locations offering drive-thru lanes to pick up digital orders.

 Digital sales accounted for over half of the companies total $1.7 billion in revenue, a 24 percent increase compared to the same period a year ago.

 Chipotle reported that it closed only five stores during the quarter, bringing the total number of locations to 2,803.

 Chipotle anticipates opening about 200 new locations in 2021.⁴⁵

Grocery stores and supermarkets did exceedingly well during the peak of the pandemic, with many large and small chains adapting their stores to delivery and pick-up aisle options for customers who didn't want to enter their brick and mortar stores.⁴⁶ Hand sanitizer products and cleaning solutions like Clorox Wipes were hard to find commodities early into the Covid pandemic.⁴⁷ I vividly remember stores rationing the number of products allowed per customer during the early days of fear when recently stocked shelves would become bare within minutes of announcing the product. My wife to this day still maintains a cache of these products, as she's anticipating recurring waves of Covid-19 as we enter the flu season in the fall.

Liquor, wine, and beer stores were an unlikely success to me, but it was validated recently when I spoke to a number of operators about their sales in the past year.⁴⁸ They explained their rationale quite clearly to me. When patrons can no longer go to restaurants and bars to drink, people buy products to consume at home. It's just that simple. Also, these businesses were deemed “essential” due to the potential impact of a run on hospitals for people that abused alcohol in their daily lives. Hospitals didn't want a run on their businesses due to alcohol shortages as their primary focus was managing Covid-19 patients.

Lastly, streaming services such has Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, HBO Go, and so forth experienced a significant surge in customers and use through the peak period of the pandemic.⁴⁹ Netflix alone added nearly 16 million new subscribers in the first quarter of 2020 and its growth numbers doubled what the company expected.⁵⁰ The 2020 first quarter was Netflix's “largest three-month jump” in the company's 13-year history.⁵¹ As someone who doesn't like being cooped up in their home for over a year, Netflix and Hulu helped get me through this pandemic with some terrific programming options.

Technology companies did exceedingly well during the pandemic as organizations across the globe had to rapidly adapt to leveraging a variety of technologies (remote access, collaboration, online meetings, intranets, etc.) during the pandemic to keep knowledge workers staff productive while working remotely. Google's parent company, Alphabet, saw revenue jump 34 percent to $55.3 billion in the first quarter of 2021.⁵² Google also reported the following:

 The company made close to $18 billion in profit.

 The company announced a $50 billion stock buyback. Companies only do this when they think their shares are undervalued.

 Google's cloud revenue increased 46 percent year over year to $4 billion.⁵³

Companies that offer enterprise-class hosting Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, all benefited during the pandemic as organizations flocked to cloud services over on-premise solutions. Microsoft's revenue jumped 19 percent in the company's third quarter as “digital adoption accelerates.”⁵⁴ Microsoft reported the following details surrounding the growth:

 Growth was primarily led by commercial cloud products, generating $17.7 billion of the total revenue.

 Revenue from Azure rose 50 percent

 Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud segment (Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, GitHub, Enterprise Services) reported $15.12 billion of the total revenue, up 23 percent.

 The active users of Microsoft Teams, the collaboration and online meeting tool, grew from 115 million in the prior quarter to 145 million in the most recent quarter.⁵⁵

Transportation companies like FedEx and UPS did quite well during the pandemic as consumers shifted to home delivery purchase options versus shopping in brick and mortar stores. Amazon.com was of course a large driver of shipped content via a variety of carriers. At the end of 2020, FedEx reported that it “more than doubled its profit in the latest quarter.⁵⁶ FedEx reported that it earned $1.23 billion in the second quarter, up from $560 million a year ago in the same quarter.⁵⁷ The transportation carrier also expects earnings to increase well into 2021 as demand continues for shipped products.⁵⁸ The company reported that ground delivery services gained 38 percent in revenue, while air-express services saw a gain of 14 percent.⁵⁹

United Parcel Service (UPS) reported in April 2021 that “daily volume jumped more than 14 percent in the first three months” of 2021 compared to the same period a year ago.⁶⁰ The company reported net income of $4.79 billion, up almost 400 percent from the same period last year with total revenue reported at $22.91 billion, a 27 percent increase.⁶¹

The telecommunications market benefited greatly from the increase in demand for cloud and more robust bandwidth from employees who were working from home. The medical field (general practitioners, specialists, and even surgeons) was impacted during the height of the pandemic as elective surgeries were postponed and hospital staff converged to support the large influx of Covid-19 patients. Hospitals across the globe lost billions in revenue. Some are now attempting to recoup their losses by charging patients for Covid-19 hospital services via lawsuits.

I spoke with a number of physicians across a wide path of specialties (general practitioners in family practice, specialists like endocrinologist, pain management, orthopedic, dermatologists) as well as physical therapists. All described impacts to their practices, including revenue decreases and how they had to scramble to provide telehealth services to patients. Telehealth options within medical practices around the globe increased rapidly in 2020, starting shortly after the height of the pandemic. Data centers and telecommunications vendors reaped hyper growth rewards to support these services.

One such specialist provided some valuable input into the impact to their practice and how technologies like telehealth have helped lesson the revenue blow during the pandemic and likely set them up for future success postpandemic.

Medical Profession Survey Question: What impact did Covid-19 have on the medical profession during the peak of the pandemic in 2020?

Covid-19 has had a substantial effect on the medical community in both outpatient clinic and inpatient hospital settings. In the outpatient clinical setting, it caused an immediate pivot from in-person clinic visits to virtual telemedicine visits. This created substantial anxiety and confusion around how to code and bill these visits, whether insurance would accept these claims, and how to manage these visits from a technological perspective. In the initial days, there was substantial confusion from physicians and patients about which communication software to use and how to implement it safely.

While patients became comfortable with many of the early adopted teleconferencing platforms, the software did not yet support the encryption required to be HIPPA compliant. This was eased by the U.S. government's relaxation of regulatory restrictions on telemedicine communications.

Our clinic saw a substantial initial reduction in patient encounters and corresponding overall revenue decline that began in March 2020 and continued until August of the same year. Clinic visits are now 50 percent virtual, and I predict that they will continue to remain at least 50 percent into the foreseeable future. This will only be tenable from a business perspective if insurance companies continue to reimburse for telemedicine visits at rates comparable to office visits.

—DR. JOSE SOROS, MD, Pain Management Specialist, Point Performance

I asked my CxO panel some questions about revenue, remote work, use of consultants, staff productivity, and sourcing strategy before, during, and post pandemic. Following are their answers with additional input noted on certain questions:

CxO Survey Question: What revenue impacts occurred in your organization during the height of the pandemic in 2020? List U.S. and global operations separately if applicable.