Tag: COVID-19

South Africa’s medium-sized businesses have generally proven to be more resilient to the prolonged weakness in the economy, and now are more likely to weather successfully the fall-out from COVID-19 lockdown, than their smaller or larger counterparts.

Bouts of market volatility may be unsettling but they are an unavoidable feature of long-term investing. The important thing is to avoid making mistakes along the way. These investment guidelines hold true for any environment, but they’re particularly useful to keep in mind during times of extreme volatility.

Read our exclusive cover story titled COVID-19 | RESET... REDEFINE, REFINE, REBUILD ...RESTART! by Dr Ivor Blumenthal, CEO, ArkKonsult, as well a host of other topical management articles written by professionals, consultants and academics in the June/July 2020 edition of BusinessBrief.

While lockdown inadvertently helped to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it is critically important that sustainability of the environment is at the heart of post-COVID-19 recovery efforts. This is where the much-talked about Green New Deal (GND) becomes crucial and while it’s no panacea to economic challenges, harnessing its benefits can help grow the economy and create jobs in a post-COVID-19 world.

Having worked in the commercial property sector for many years, let me state a truth universally acknowledged, but often overlooked: we will come through this, and the sector will recover from the significant knocks its faced recently as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

After more than two months of hard lockdown, corporate travellers have been itching to get back to the boardroom. With Level 3 regulations implemented on June 1, a number of businesses were able to resume operations while business travellers could – to some extent – take to the skies again.

The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic will see the battle of the banks intensify, as both legacy and challenger financial institutions race to use tech innovation to gain a competitive advantage in 2020/2021. To some extent, history may be repeating itself, as the financial pressure exerted by the pandemic forces bank management teams to pursue cost discipline while attempting to meet ever expanding customer expectations.

A number of fundamental changes to the Competition Act demonstrate government's strengthened policy commitment to drive radical economic transformation in South Africa and are likely to be more regularly used in the midst of COVID-19.

The scale of the national COVID-19 lockdown is unprecedented in living memory. The repercussions – personal, professional, national and international – will reverberate for years to come. As entrepreneurs, we need to be making the right decisions for right now to ensure that our businesses and our people’s livelihoods do not become another casualty of the virus. 

What does the economic downturn mean for the asset management sector and how should we respond? The asset management industry is facing uncharted territory as it grapples with the impact of COVID-19 on business models and the challenge of integrating technology into their existing business models.