How Coronavirus is impacting the Tech Industry

What is Coronavirus?

Coronaviruses are a group of related viruses that causes diseases in both mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses cause infections in the respiratory tract that can be mild, such as some cases of the common cold. There are several kinds of the virus, and some cause diseases. A newly identified type of the virus that has caused a recent outbreak of respiratory illness now is referred to as COVID-19.

As the pandemic of coronavirus continues to spread all around the globe, the scope of its impact has been incredibly different.  While, of course, the health and safety of people around the world are of utmost concern, the severity of COVID-19's impact on private industry and the global economy cannot be understated.  As supply chains are heavily disrupted, the confidence of consumers continue to go down.

While some industries might be worse off than other companies, COVID-19 has not left tech untouched in any area, both on the consumer side as well as in the areas of enterprises. Big tech companies have been suffering somewhat publicly from issues that are related to coronavirus, with some of them shutting down their physical China-based (and beyond) operations and experiencing high disruptions to their Chinese hardware supply-lines. Below are some of the areas that it has affected in the tech industries.

Some Tech sectors that have been impacted by Coronavirus

1. Conferences: Massive tech conferences, such as the Facebook's F8 or GSMA's Mobile World Congress and a host of others have been postponed or canceled, and they have a run-on effect on major vendors and smaller IT services companies who spend large money to showcase their wares. This issue is becoming worse every week and now has an immediate price tag that is exceeding (USD) $1 billion.

2. Employment opportunities: Amazon announced in a post that it was hiring 100,000 warehouse workers to meet up with the surging demand for their products due to people working from home.  With people told to work from home and stay away from others, the epidemic has extended people's reliance on services from the technology industry’s biggest companies while further increasing the trends that were already benefiting them.

3. Ecommerce: Amazon has muscled in on brick-and-mortar retailers for several years now, but shoppers who are now reluctant to go to the physical stores are turning to the e-commerce giant for a much wider variety of goods, like groceries and over-the-counter drugs.

4. Video Streaming Services: Several video streaming services such as Netflix have reduced box office sales for movies in recent years. As movie theaters are now closed under government orders, Netflix and YouTube are gaining a broader audience. Stay-at-home orders are unsurprisingly increasing the traffic to video streaming apps, sites, and other video-related sites.

5. Cloud Computing: Companies were already discarding their own data centers to rent a cloud computing space. That shift is likely to speed up as millions of employees globally are forced to work from home, therefore putting a strain on corporate technology infrastructures. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who are the three major cloud-computing platforms, are currently swimming in cash and offering deep discounts for renting the underlying infrastructure for a corporate network as well as the software used by employees. The shift to work at home has also demonstrated the advantages of cloud computing when the use case unexpectedly comes up. For companies that are managing their internet infrastructures, making adjustments to computing needs on the fly is very expensive and complicated. Cloud computing makes this way much easier.

6. Advertising: Advertising, which is the lifeblood of Google and Facebook, happens to suffer during these economic downturns. The stocks of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabets which is Google’s parent company, have collectively lost more than $1 trillion in market value from a month ago, when U.S. stocks traded at record highs. And Microsoft and Apple have reduced their short-term financial forecasts because of slowing consumer spending.

7. Video conferencing: Several Video conferencing services such as  Zoom are now very important, also, Voice calling over Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service has doubled in volume.   but ride-hailing firms like Uber and Lyft and property-rental sites like Airbnb are seeing customers vanish.

8. Mobile Applications: Over the past two weeks Revenues of the sales of iPhone and Android applications grew much higher than it was.

9. Social Networks: In all of the above, I think social networking sites gained a much higher active user because, with the stay at home policy, people now spend a lot of time on social networking sites to kill boredom and catch up with friends and families.

10. E-Learning Sites: with the current epidemic outbreak of coronavirus, parents, for example, are now enrolling their kids on eLearning sites to continue their education from the comfort of their homes