The coronavirus has quickly spread across the globe.

Whether you love it (hopefully not) or hate it (more likely), you certainly can’t escape it. I’m joking. Partially.

The coronavirus, known also as COVID-19, is quickly taking over the world with well over 100,000 reported cases worldwide and certainly a lot more unreported ones as well. With symptoms similar to the flu that take can take up to five days to appear, the pandemic is spreading quickly across the world. Now, I’m not here to give you a health lesson, however, the virus does pose some interesting questions for the tech industry.

The coronavirus has already impacted numerous events with the likes of the Mobile World Congress, which has been cancelled, as well as Google’s I/O developer conference and Facebook’s F8 conference which will be attempted in a streamed digital format rather than in person.

There are issues with the supply of hardware as most of it is manufactured in China – the origin of the outbreak. If anything, the coronavirus is proving major companies need more resilient supply chains, although the appealing costs of producing in China are often too good. For Apple, this has been a big blow with reports of iPhone 11 shortages as factories are either completely closed down or working at a reduced capacity. However, they will take solace in the fact infections in Wuhan and the surrounding area are reportedly slowing down. The Cupertino giant’s main rival in the mobile market, Samsung, isn’t as affected as plenty of manufacturing is taking place in the likes of Vietnam and India which aren’t nearly as badly affected.

Apple, of course, isn’t the only company with a major part of the workforce in China. Others such as HP, Cisco, and Tesla have also been affected, delaying production and reducing profits. Furthermore, China has a huge smartphone market; it is one of the few places where the iPhone doesn’t have a massive market share. Huawei generally dominates the market with Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi lower down, and Apple somewhere in between depending on which source you look at. There will be a global impact now that the production of these devices is affected, with consumers possibly looking into other options (as long as they are not busy stockpiling toilet paper.)

Mailing List Like this content? Subscribe to the mailing list and receive monthly updates by email! Your name (optional) Your email address

So, what can we expect from the coronavirus in the future? In the shorter-term, event cancellations, staff absences and a reduction in sales are decreasing job security amongst many due to the financial uncertainty that COVID-19 is causing. In the UK, the Bank of England has announced a reduction in the base interest rate from 0.75% to 0.25% in a bid to reduce the impact of the virus on small and medium-sized businesses. This should, hopefully, help both employers and employees although at this stage it’s still too early to tell how the coronavirus will develop.

Globally, the likes of self-isolation and illness will lead to decreased spending which will harm the economy. Italy, especially, is in danger; being the second most affected country by the coronavirus, they can expect more financial trouble after its years of cash problems.

The long-term impacts are harder to predict, although again, we can expect employee layoffs and unemployment to rise in certain areas of the world. In the UK, employees on so-called ‘zero-hour contracts’ are in big trouble as they will simply not be given any hours to work, equalling no pay.

On the upside, tech firms may not be as badly affected. After all, whether you are an IT admin or a software developer, you should have the ability to work from home, even during self-isolation. Meetings can be conducted through online conferencing, messages can be sent through instant messaging, and accessing work resources remotely is possible as well. Employees in cloud environments should be able to access work anywhere and on-premises infrastructure can often be made available through the likes of VPNs or remote desktop servers. This would be true for most office jobs, although other careers involving more physical work are likely to see issues.

What’s more, managed service providers and external IT consultants will see an opportunity for increasing profits, as grim as that sounds. With businesses making home-working arrangements in response to the coronavirus, requests for projects such as hardware upgrades to RDS servers and deployment of myriads of laptops for remote working have greatly increased. The main downside, from my experience, is the hardware (especially laptops) is becoming increasingly difficult to find and the failing supply chains are causing great shortages and delays which will only get worse as the virus spreads.

To summarise, the coronavirus is causing much trouble in the tech industry as it is doing with the rest of our economy. The UK is trying to contain the havoc, as are most other countries, however an increase in unemployment and supply shortages are expected among other things. The true impact of COVID-19 will depend on a range of factors such as the containment strategies that are implemented as well as the ability to produce and distribute a vaccine once it’s available. We’ll just have to wait and see.

If you’d like to drop me a message, you can email contact@themegabyte.co.uk or use buttons below.