Coronavirus and the following lockdown created a difficult period for the world. The world economy is in crisis. Industries are slowing down and businesses are forced to adopt alternative measures to steer forward. There will be a major change in the nature of work and the way work is carried out, says C. Balagopal, entrepreneur, investor and mentor. Lockdown will affect all major sectors of the economy such as healthcare, retail, education, training and skilling, IT Services and even manufacturing.
In the case of manufacturing, there will be more distributed manufacturing. It involves disintegrating manufacturing processes from large integrated business factories to distributed processing centres. Today, there are IT tools and many other technologies available which make such a thing possible.
Next important point is that the present troubles and disruption have had a profound impact on the way govt work is carried out. Today, repeated personal visits by a person to a govt office is required to get the work done or even to collect some information. Balagopal believes that this will be an area which will change hopefully. Much more of these processes will be carried out online. This will open up many opportunities for MSMEs particularly in the IT sector and related service sectors.
Third, this is a total lockdown which is unlike anything we have seen in the past. Its impact will hit every sector of the economy. Supply chains will be seriously damaged. It will take time to fix. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to re-examine their business models. Entrepreneurs should ask themselves, “If I were not already in this business, would I get into it today? If the answer is negative, this is a good opportunity for them to take a decision to shut down them even though they’ve been carried out for a long time.
