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Michael Tome

Business Reporter

Businesses are slowly finding their way round Covid-19 constraints with a number of local firms saying they have devised effective business models and new strategies to overcome the negative impacts of the global pandemic.

This comes on the back of a challenging period since March 2020, which disrupted the environment for industry and commerce, as the pandemic took a heavy toll on most businesses globally.

Covid-19 resulted in imposition of travel bans and movement restrictions worldwide in a bid to curb its spread, which negatively affected many business activities.

According to the World Bank, nearly every business in the world has been negatively impacted by Covid-19 in one way or another, while a quarter of companies saw sales falling by at least 50 percent between October 2020 and January 2021.

Data shows that nearly  every business in the world has been negatively affected by Covid-19, through multiple shocks at the same time.

In an interview on the sidelines of the CEO Roundtable Africa annual meeting last week, Proton chief human resources officer Elvis Ncube said his company had to formulate new methods to reach their clientele, which was trapped by the initiated lockdown.

“In the beginning, yes, we were affected, as you know there were strict lockdowns, and only essential service providers were operating, which meant fewer trading hours, and fewer trading hours affected our volume uptake.

“But, we strategised to say let us take our products to the people so as to remain afloat, thus we established online shopping to mitigate all those challenges including the risk of contamination.

“As a company, we never reached a point where we said, let us retrench our staff, we maintained our employment levels throughout the period,” said Mr Ncube.

To protect the company from the ravaging impact of the pandemic, Mr Ncube said they worked to attain 100 percent herd immunity for Proton Bakers workforce, who have all been vaccinated.

“Presently, we have managed to ensure that all our employees are vaccinated. About 1 727 (0f our) employees, I can confirm, have all been vaccinated now,” he added.

THE Agricultural Finance Company (AFC) Financial Director Elfas Chimbera said Covid-19 pushed the company to innovate and move along with the dynamics of technology.

“After realising that the pandemic is not going away, we took it by the horns and said how can we navigate through this, we quickly embraced it.

“We can actually say the pandemic jolted us into action as we started investing in the new technologies immediately. We started looking ahead, even training our employees to actually use the latest technology.

“The technology has even made us understand our clients more under this environment because now instead of waiting for a physical visit we can now interact with our customers flexibly from anywhere without the actual visit.

“Physical absence is no longer a limitation because now you can do remote working, funny enough we even managed to record more profits in the year, “he said.

The World Bank reveals that on average, companies’ sales dropped 27 percent in October 2020-January 2021 from pre-pandemic levels.