Corona beer is surviving Corona

Instant soup sales went up

In the UK we’re not in total lockdown mode yet, but we’re already showing signs of erratic behaviour. After the first positive diagnosis, people began to stockpile. One in 10 UK consumers have already started, which has forced supermarkets to bring in rations on basics like pasta, UHT milk and canned vegetables. It’s no different on the continent. Over the past week in Germany, instant soup sales went up 112 per cent; tinned fish and fruit by 70 per cent; pasta by 73 per cent; and tinned vegetables by 80 per cent.

Grocery deliveries are also on the up in the UK, as supermarkets experience Christmas-level demand for at-home deliveries in the past week. Even after increasing capacity by 20 per cent, time slots keep selling out. Demand is so high, one supermarket executive suggested the army be drafted in to help.

London-based food delivery app Deliveroo has already started benefitting from quarantine measures. Its Hong Kong lunch orders increased by almost 100 per cent last month, compared to January.

The shares of Zoom almost doubled

If quarantine measures come into place, that demand is only going to increase. As will the need for at-home entertainment, which explains why financial analysts everywhere are betting on the stocks of Netflix, Facebook, and livestream-workout company Peloton.

And as more offices in the UK start to close, the same trend will be seen here. Facebook, Sony and Nike were among the first to send their employees home, and the markets predict they won’t be the last.

While the vast majority of stocks have plummeted over the past few weeks, shares in Zoom are worth almost double what they were at the beginning of January. The video conferencing platform took a hit late last year, but the world’s sudden commitment to remote working has made the company more valuable than ever. Embarrassingly, the stock of the similarly named Zoom Technologies doubled in February as investors bet on the wrong company by mistake.

Workplace chat app Slack has also been booming – shares rose 30.3 per cent in February – adding to the growing pile of evidence that remote working is Covid-19’s biggest beneficiary so far.

In China, the sheer quantity of people working via the cloud has forced tech companies to upgrade their existing remote working apps or launch new services entirely. Bloomberg’s Shelly Banjo and Lulu Chen were proven right when they wrote: “While the Corona virus is scary for humanity, it’s likely to provide a shot in the arm to the country’s workforce productivity apps”.

Even without quarantine measures in place, workplaces all over the world are already being heavily affected – and it may not be temporary. “I think this is going to have a long-term impact on how we work on a virtual basis for the whole world”, says Chung. “The growth rates may not be as aggressive when the pandemic is over, but once we develop this habit of living our lives online, that will change our long-term consumption habits”.

People are shopping online instead

Habits are a powerful thing. They’re strong enough to keep people buying Corona, despite the negative name connection, but when people’s habits shift, they become a prime target for new products and services. As citizens are forced to stay home, they’ll adapt their lives accordingly and so will the businesses around them. Once that switched-up routine becomes second nature, it’ll be hard to break.

As Duhigg says:

“Habits shape our lives far more than we realise — they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.”

This isn’t the first time millions of people’s habits were shifted by an pandemic. Arguably the reason China’s online retail industry has been so successful is because it was spurred into necessity by Sars in 2003.

“Although it sickened thousands and killed almost eight hundred people, the outbreak had a curiously beneficial impact on the Chinese Internet sector”, Duncan Clark wrote in The House That Jack Ma Built, his biography of the Alibaba founder. “Crucially for Alibaba, SARS convinced millions of people, afraid to go outside, to try shopping online instead”.

If Sars got China hooked on online shopping, could the Corona virus change the way we work? As the pandemic continues to keep people out of the office, we could see a dramatic shift. At the very least, the current workplace technology will exponentially improve. Either way, we’ve found ourselves an unexpected winner.