UK businesses are struggling for survival owing to the contagion Pandemic Coronavirus. Some of the hardest hit are the small to medium sized businesses and retail outlets.
An example of this is Dave Griffin, 49, who is the managing director of Chauffeur Services Direct, a nationwide service he runs from Worcester. He states that his company has lost nearly 80% of its bookings due to the virus outbreak.
Dave quoted in an interview for the Guardian – “We usually have a turnover of about £3,000-4,000 a week but last week we were down to about £500, So we’ve been losing 70-80% of actual bookings.”
“This time we’ll end up with an economic crash on the scale of 2008, if not greater,” he said. (The financial crisis of 2007–08, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, was a severe worldwide economic crisis considered by many economists to have been the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, to which it is often compared. – credit: Wikipedia)
So far the virus has already affected many jobs as people are being laid off to reduce costs to businesses. The financial crisis in 2008 was primarily caused by deregulation in the financial industry. That permitted banks to engage in hedge fund trading with derivatives. When the values of the derivatives crumbled, banks stopped lending to each other. That created the financial crisis.
Businesses are having to adapt and change what they do and how they work to ensure they can continue to provide their products and services. For years, many businesses have kept their staff tied to their office desks and the Coronavirus has forced them to re-evaluate what they do and how they work. For starters, businesses are now asking their staff to work from home and giving them the tools to be able do this, such as a laptop computer and a VoIP cloud telephone which enables them to carry on working just as if they were in their office, but without the risk of infecting or being infected by their co-workers who may have the Coronavirus.
The government will be putting a large sum of money to help fight against the virus. A great portion of this amount will also be invested in tech companies, start-ups and others in the health care space to perform research and development and come up with a vaccine and other treatments for this and similar viruses.
This Pandemic will change the face of businesses forever, some businesses will sadly fail and others will permanently change where and how they work!