The Pandemic and business globalization

 Covid-19 and the nearly year-long global shutdown it caused profoundly shifted the communication and logistics of international business. As populations grappled with observing new hygiene and social distancing protocols to survive a global pandemic, the businesses on which their livelihood depended upon were forced to reevaluate how they conducted themselves in order to survive. While the pandemic was, without question, a tragedy, it exposed weaknesses and inefficiencies in our existing systems and processes that ultimately improved domestic and international business.

Some adopted trends have endured past the pandemic, most notably the adaptation of work-from-home positions by the general workforce and the adoption of teleconferencing virtually instead of more expensive and time-consuming face-to-face meetings. Less obvious but equally important adaptations were the shift to cloud computing and digitization.

Closed borders, curfews, travel limitations, trade restrictions, and an incident involving a single ship blocking traffic in one of the most important shipping channels in the world exposed weaknesses in the global supply chain. A delayed effect of the disruption in global supply chain was the microchip shortage in 2021 that affected the ability for consumers to purchase new vehicles.  The result was that while vehicle dealers were sitting with empty lots, sellers of used vehicles were enjoying the luxury of being able to sell their vehicles for nearly the cost of what a new vehicle would have been had they been available.  This caused companies to reevaluate the supply chain of such a critical component of their products, and companies in the United States rushed to build facilities and train employees to manufacture computer chips domestically.  This example and many others demonstrates the shift towards diversification and exploring localized product and material sourcing. Companies that survived successfully shifted their focus from efficiency and cost reduction to resiliency.

Four years post-pandemic, the global market has, for the most part, recovered. Supply chains are still threatened by border closures caused by international and domestic conflict, but thanks to the practices that were normalized during the pandemic these conflicts have less impact than they could have. 

Not all businesses were able to successfully shift to a remote model and have defaulted back to more traditional in-person practices. It would be unreasonable to expect that a fully domestic or fully remote business model would be sustainable in the long term for a business's growth. Instead, the businesses that survived the pandemic by adapting new strategies, post-pandemic, had the luxury of hybridizing, which in turn has strengthened them for future growth and possibly immunized them from further disruptions in the future.