Big Tech's big growth during crisis

OAKLAND (California) • While the rest of the economy is tanking from the crippling effects of the coronavirus, business at the biggest technology companies is holding steady and even thriving.

Amazon said it was hiring 100,000 warehouse workers to meet surging demand. Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said traffic for video calling and messaging had exploded. Microsoft said the numbers using its software for online collaboration had climbed nearly 40 per cent in a week.

With people told to work from home and stay away from others, the pandemic has deepened reliance on services from the technology industry's biggest companies while accelerating trends that were already benefiting them.

Amazon has muscled in on brick-and-mortar retailers for years, but shoppers now reluctant to go to the store are turning to the e-commerce giant for a wider variety of goods, such as over-the-counter drugs.

Streaming services like Netflix have dampened box-office sales for movies in recent years. Now, as movie theatres close under government orders, Netflix and YouTube are gaining a new audience.

Companies were already dumping their own data centres to rent computing from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. That shift is likely to speed up as millions of employees are forced to work from home, putting a strain on corporate technology infrastructures.

Even Apple, which once appeared to be among United States companies most at risk from the coronavirus because of its dependence on Chinese factories and consumers, appears to be on good footing. Many of its factories are nearly back to normal, people are spending more time and money on its digital services and, last Wednesday, it even released new gadgets.

"The largest tech companies could emerge on the other side of this much stronger," said Mr Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.

That is not to say major technology companies should not be worried. Advertising, the lifeblood of Google and Facebook, tends to suffer during economic downturns.

The stocks of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google's parent company, Alphabet, have collectively lost more than US$1 trillion (S$1.45 trillion) in market value from a month ago, when US stocks traded at record highs. And Microsoft and Apple have cut their short-term financial forecasts because of slowing consumer spending.

Beyond the biggest companies, it is more of a struggle.

Communication tools such as video-conferencing service Zoom are now essential, but ride-hailing firms like Uber and Lyft and property-rental sites like Airbnb are seeing customers vanish.

The US$3.9-trillion global technology industry will suffer this year, though how much remains unclear.

In December, research firm IDC forecasted 5 per cent worldwide growth for sales of hardware, software and services this year.

After it became apparent a month ago the coronavirus would disrupt supplies and cut sales in China, it said annual revenue might inch ahead at only 1 per cent. That growth now looks decidedly optimistic, said Mr Frank Gens, chief analyst at IDC.

But when the economy does eventually improve, Big Tech could benefit from changes in consumer habits.

While Amazon has changed shopping habits for items such as books, getting customers to trust it with groceries has been challenging. Now, as more people are forced to stay home, one of the last strongholds of physical retailing may be coming under pressure.

Mr Michael Crowe, from North Carolina, ordered groceries from Amazon for the first time recently because he did not want to risk going to a supermarket. "I could see myself doing it longer term when this is over," said Mr Crowe, 36, who works for home improvement retailer Lowe's.

As more customers try different Amazon services, they may create permanent shifts in buying habits, said Mr Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon employee and the founder of CommerceIQ, a company whose automation software is used by major brands such as Kellogg's and Kimberly-Clark.

In a blog post last week, Mr Dave Clark, Amazon's senior vice-president of worldwide operations, said it was adding the new jobs at its US warehouses and delivery network because "our labour needs are unprecedented for this time of year".

One reason for Amazon's increase in demand is that shoppers are buying a broader variety of goods. From Feb 20 to March 15, over-the-counter cold medicine sales rose ninefold on Amazon in the US from a year earlier. Dog food orders increased 13-fold and paper towels and toilet paper sales tripled, according to CommerceIQ.

Stay-at-home orders are unsurprisingly increasing traffic to video-streaming sites, apps and social-media platforms. Downloads of Netflix's app - a proxy for traffic from the streaming site - jumped 66 per cent in Italy, according to data from Sensor Tower, an app data company.

In Spain, they rose 35 per cent. In the US, where Netflix was already popular, there was a 9 per cent bump. Netflix declined to comment on whether it was seeing a surge in subscribers.

Government officials in Europe even called Mr Reed Hastings, the chief executive, to ask if Netflix could reduce the video quality of its streams to lighten the strain on the region's Internet network. The company agreed to do it for 30 days.

YouTube also agreed to suspend streaming of high-definition video in Europe for a month.

NYTIMES