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Who is good in a crisis: examples of IT companies whose stocks rise during a pandemic



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Recently, the Internet has been actively writing about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and related quarantine measures on business. Many industries were actually stopped - for example, tourism - or seriously reduced their activity - for example, the restaurant business, where there was only delivery and in some places the opportunity to cook take-away.

Today we’ll talk about how IT companies cope with the crisis, and which of them managed to use the situation to good advantage.

Is everyone doing well


No, there are also victims in the technology sector - for example, Airbnb is forced to cancel large-scale projects to launch penthouse rentals at the Rockefeller Center in New York and is attracting loans.

Taxi services Uber and Lyft also faced a decline in demand against the background of quarantine. This led to Uber seriously thinking about large-scale reductions (and already lost CTO), and Lyft has already announced a reduction of almost 17% of the staff.

But there are examples of how a pandemic and quarantine can play into the hands of business.

Manufacturers of computers and components


Three IT giants received an unexpected bonus from coronavirus - office workers who were locked at home needed equipment. As a result, demand for both computers and related products, such as monitors, keyboards and mice, has grown. Not every quarantined employee was able to get the right set of equipment from the employer, as a result, they had to buy something on their own.

According to statistics, in the first half of March alone, sales of monitors in the United States alone increased by 80,000 units. Sales of laptops, mice and keyboards only in March increased by 10%.

Increased demand spurred stocks of manufacturers, some of which were cheaper. Microsoft was just growing:



Dell and IBM were able to mitigate the fall: in the last year, both companies on the exchange did not go very well.

Video Conferencing Software


One of the main business beneficiaries of the current crisis is Zoom video conferencing service. The company managed to increase the number of users from 10 million to 200 million in just three months.

It is not surprising that the value of the company's shares also increased: from $ 113.11 in early March to $ 135 in late April.



Not without its oddities: this is not the first time investors have confused the shares of the Zoom service with the securities of the Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Zoom Technologies. As a result, the shares of the wrong Zoom soared in price by 557% - not as much as a couple of years ago, when in the same situation, investors increased the value of shares by 47,000%.

Streaming services and game developers


During isolation at home, people not only work and make phone calls, but also have fun. One of the most obvious ways to do this is to watch movies and TV shows. This played into the hands of streaming services - for example, the Netflix service in the first three months of 2020 increased its audience by 15.8 million users. At the same time, Wall Street analysts had recently forecast a growth of 7 million.

Now the company's stock price is approximately $ 420 apiece, Netflix has overtaken Disney in terms of capitalization.



A similar situation for game developers. For example, the value of the shares of the Canadian gamedev company Electronic Arts has also grown significantly.

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