Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 throughout the world, many countries are in lockdown and the production level of all countries is certainly going to take a dig. Despite this Chinese companies responded in different ways to overcome the crisis. Here are some lessons with real-time examples. These lessons are something new for leaders to take it up and grow, not just in time of crisis but forever.
- Master Kong (Noodles Company), predicted the shift in sales and moved the focus from large retailers to small stores and online sellers. As a result, the market share increased during reopening time at a rate of 3 times to their competitors.
- Supor (Kitchenware manufacturer) reacted early to the outbreak and gave guidelines and instruction to its employees on handling the abnormal situation. They also gave health checkups for their employees and their families. This helped in the timely resumption of work
- As Malls, restaurants, cinemas and hotels are in shut down. The employees in these places were used in supermarket chain like Hema to compensate the increasing online orders during the lockdown. This reallocation of human resource helped the business in proper utilisation of the workforce.
- Companies like Lin Qingxuan and Cosmolady instructed its employees to engage the customers online through social media activities in application like Wechat. This helped in increasing the sales for Lin Qingxuan and, Cosmolady created a sales ranking, this motivated all the staff and resulted in increased revenue for the company.
- A travel agency that is having poor business used the lockdown period and instructed its employees to design a new product and to improve skills. This shall eventually help in recovering from the poor business.
- A large global food & beverage conglomerate used this lockdown in altering its product mix in a way to include more health-relevant products, online sales and imported products.
- Kuaishou (Social video platform) used this opportunity and approached educational institutions in offering education to their students via Kuaishou partnering with the Ministry of Education in China.
- Chinese dairy company drafted, the supply of goods to severely virus-infected areas, from other parts of the region. so that they don’t lose the market share in the infected places.
- An insurance company named Ant Financial offered free insurance to corona related problems saw a 30% increase in its monthly income.
- Companies have moved on to more online activities like digital marketing and, promotional campaigns from traditional offline activities. This is going to permanently change the way of marketing activities of companies now and forever.
These lessons were gathered from Chinese companies and undoubtedly USA, Korea, Japan and Italy are now facing the COVID-19 impact and indeed the companies in these countries will also come up with new lessons for leaders to protect their business and employees.
Reference
1. How Chinese Companies Have Responded to Coronavirus; Martin Reeves-Lars Fæste-Cinthia Chen-Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak-Kevin Whitaker – https://hbr.org/2020/03/how-chinese-companies-have-responded-to-coronavirus
