Coronavirus: can Asia’s small businesses survive Covid-19?
- As the death toll from the coronavirus mounts, economists warn the business world’s greatest casualty will be small and medium-sized enterprises
- That’s a big problem in Asia, where they account for 90 per cent of firms and employ half of all workers
Digital payments company Nium has been experiencing a surge of activity from mom-and-pop businesses in recent weeks. Unfortunately, that’s not as positive as it might sound.
With the novel coronavirus continuing its deadly spread across the globe, many of the inquiries have been from troubled small and medium-sized businesses, which normally use Nium to pay their bills or staff salaries but are now looking either to cancel their memberships or to stall payments to their suppliers.
“We have never seen anything like this,” said Nium co-founder Prajit Nanu. “The travel segment, for example, has been destroyed. Online agencies and small mom-and-pop businesses are gone. All we do now is refunds.”
Surviving firms, said Nanu, were now mostly concerned with how to conserve cash and stay afloat through a pandemic that has killed more than 160,000 people, infected 2.4 million and still shows no sign of slowing.
While the human costs mount, experts say the greatest economic casualty will be small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – a problem that will be acutely felt in the Asia-Pacific, where SMEs account for more than 90 per cent of businesses, according to the World Bank, and employ 50 per cent of the workforce.