[Closed] What industries are doing well out of COVID?

Alcan.

Mercedes and associated lease companies will be doing well supplying all of the supermarkets home delivery vans

Internet providers, telecomms, etc.

Amazon and Royal Mail are doing alright, despite the latter manipulating the figures as per normal, to try and get the USO changed.

My wife is a manager at locum Doctor recruitment agency. They're doing fine.

The NHS seems to be pretty busy at the moment if that counts?

Dog breeders seem to be doing OK. My brother is selling golden labs for £3k each and has a waiting list. Before covid they were selling for £650 each.

Edit as don’t want to derail thread

PPE middlemen? et al

I can vouch for telecomms. The busiest I've seen it for 15 years, suppliers can't meet demand at the moment!

Corner shops
Bike shops
Car salesman
painters, joiners etc

Tradesmen I known are busier than ever

Serco. Making millions out of failing to provide their contracted services.

How about others like consultancy around making companies more efficient?

The only time we had a consultant round on some government sponsored scheme, they advised us make all our staff self employed or on zero hours and that the length of time it takes from appointment to being in a position to get paid made the whole sector of business unviable.

Apart from liking, respecting, and relying on our staff which meant we weren’t going anywhere near the advice, the advice was completely against HMRC regulations, the spirit of employment law (I am sure if you were greedy enough to contemplate this there would be a way round this), and morality.

I am not sure how much they charged the government for the consultation but my teenage son on a bad day could have offered better advice (or at least advice less likely to result in an employment tribunal or a big tax bill)

Sex pond manufacturers.

Pizza Oven Makers

From December baby product manufacturers.

Anyone in the Teams/Zoom/Webex space (and generally, tech supporting WFH stuff) is flat out busy.

Yep, the pet industry is doing well and so are outdoor sports. Kayaks and paddleboards have been flying off the shelves all summer.

Any company that has donated enough to the tories to get a contract they never have to deliver

Face masks manufacturers....

Regards supermarkets and corner shops doing well.... Some have done well so far however some arnt. retail press reported 30% of independent retail (food) shut during lockdown, some have reliance on office workers.
Supermarkets, although I'm sure will have done well, are now having a downturn in trade but an upturn in delivery trade.

Local BBQ shop near us has been killing it - he reckons people who binned off their big overseas holidays spent Money on the garden instead.
Same story with the garden centres near us - they were rammed as soon as they were able to re-open.

I went into our LBS a few weeks ago (North Kent - sells Yeti/Santa-cruz/etc) and he didn't have a single new bike in there.
I asked him what was going on and he said he'd sold everything during lock-down and now couldn't get anymore stock.
He's worried about Christmas stock as the distributors keep cutting his order or 2021 stock due to pressures from bigger shops.
He did really well during lock-down but reckons lots of small bike shops will struggle over the winter with no stock as they can't survive on servicing alone.

Peloton, Zwift, expensivehomeexcercisestuffonline.com etc

People selling hand gel have been rubbing their hands together.

Divorce lawyers

Estate agents selling properties on the Scottish Islands must have had a bumper year.

I was working part-time in my LBS up until June - it was flat out mental, 200% busier than they're busiest period ever. Web sales in 1 month were bigger than the previous year.

IT Support, we've never been busier and whilst new client recruitment has always been slow for us, it's picked up massively as the bigger players in our industry who are more 'efficient' than us are struggling with demand and small business who've traditionally do it themselves need support to facilitate WFH. We also can't secure enough stock of hardware to meet demand.

Car sales, New and Used I know businesses who sell both and their biggest issues is they can't get stock at the moment. We bought a new car for my Wife, the dealer sold her old car 3yrs old and 20k miles for £5 less than we bought it new.

Builders, at least home improvement sized ones are still booked 6 months in advance, one of my mates who runs one missed 3 days of work back in March. Completely horror story on day 1 as most of his jobs got cancelled, within days he'd either replaced them, or they'd been rebooked.

Larger builders are struggling a bit, large contracts take years to start, but can get cancelled in seconds. Also some are finding it hard to make existing contracts profitable whilst maintaining SD. Still, there are loads of School and Hospitals being built.

Bike shops Obvs.

Looking at some of the business pages, it seems that consumers have't really decided to save their money, through a combination of boredom and a "post Covid boom" they've spent it all where they could, when they could. Obviously it wasn't really "post covid" but it felt like it and people spent to enjoy themselves. We'll have to look at the unemployment figures through winter now to know if it will happen again in the Spring when we're likely to be really post-covid.

This is almost ironic, but the two industries / business we all laughed (in work) that were going to do well have suffered the most.

A Nursing agency we support has closed for good, they'd been having a tough run of it and whilst you'd might assume they'd be busy, in actual fact with most electives and out-patient clinics being cancelled and A&E admissions down 70% stopped in an influx of new 'customers' they had almost zero work. Most of their roster have taken jobs within the NHS again.

Funeral Directors. Funerals are steady business at any time, whereas you might have to wait a week to bury a loved one, at the (last) peak of Covid it was nearly 3 weeks, they might have managed to squeeze another service in per day, but with only Simple funerals being allowed, they've had fleets of cars and their drivers sitting idle, no services to arrange etc. Having buried my FIL in April, it was the most low key thing imaginable, took about 15 mins. There's no money in that for them.

My wife is daft busy with registering chemicals, including hand sanitisers for all manner of companies. We're slightly busy too at PHE, no idea why though.

As above, gym kit companies, outdoor kit etc. And definitely postal and couriers.

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Cougar
Full Member

People selling hand gel have been rubbing their hands together.

👏

Banks have been quite busy administering the government loans. Investment banking has been very busy with all the large corporates raising money to tide them through the hard times. Transactional banking (debit cards, ATMs etc) dropped right off but is now back to normal (almost). Very large provisions on the balance sheet though for bad loans 🙁

I got put on garden leave at the start of the month and will be mads redundant on the 30th.

Start a new job at a pharmaceutical company on the 1st Oct so hopefully they’ll be doing no alright!

Gaming software companies. Shares are very healthy there.

I got put on garden leave at the start of the month and will be mads redundant on the 30th.

Start a new job at a pharmaceutical company on the 1st Oct so hopefully they’ll be doing no alright!

See, I love redundancy stories like that - assume you got a bit of a pay-off to?

That's pretty much how my 2nd redundancy went.

Any company that sells digital services that prior to CV19 were considered interesting but not essential as the face-to-face version was preferred.

For example:

- companies providing remote surveying via drones

- online insurance claim loss adjusting - rather than visit a damaged house website, they can look at client photos of the damage

- online estate agencies

I would imagine makers of shotguns and tweeds will have a had a bit of a boom in the last couple of weeks

High-end bike manufacturers. 2020 stock is basically gone, and someone on here was suggesting much of 2021's stock is already accounted for too

I work in 'underserved' banking (credit builder cards etc) which is doing fairly well as it would in a lull in the economy, AND in the IT area which has been mega busy since March, deploying over a thousand laptops etc.

assume you got a bit of a pay-off to?

Cheers, was bricking it as couldn’t be at a worse time and I’m the only income in the house. Cv went off last Friday, interviews Weds & offer Thurs. never been so quick especially as was my first interview in 7 years.

Settlement Agreement still being negotiated. Not a brilliant amount but better than nowt esp as I have an immediate start. Hopefully old employer doesn’t drag it out so I can still leave on the 30th.

I work in ‘underserved’ banking

Cabot by any chance?

VOD services?

Netflix
Sky
Prime
Disney+

Etc

Even more so come Autumn Winter

I do interim work and the market is super busy

I've upped my rate 20% since March and am turning down contracts

It would be great to get back to working at client premises though - I really don't enjoy working from home 5 days a week

From what I see amongst my clients (commercial banking):

The good:

Uk holidays / caravan parks / lodges etc - had an amazing summer, with extended bookings into the autumn. More than made up for closure in q2.

Board games sales have had a massive boom.

Food manufacturing / processing have had a good covid where they sell into retail (rather than food service).

The bad:

Wedding venues

Breweries

Nuff said really.

As above banking itself has been very busy with support loans etc but income for most banks will be well down due to low base rate, higher losses and less money being moved around. Doubt there will be many tears shed!

Horticulture, I run a commercial nursery, we couldn't grow enough plants. We made an absolute killing. Everyone was at home gardening

Surprised nobody has mentioned Weight Watchers, Noom and other fad diet peddlars.
Just seen an ad for XLS medical “up to 5x more weight loss!” clinically proven weight loss pills! Bet they’re doing ok.

Windows 7 legacy software switcher overers.

My local offy said every day was like Christmas Eve

Cabot by any chance?

God no! 😀 I know a few ex-employees of theirs though.

Horticulture, I run a commercial nursery, we couldn’t grow enough plants. We made an absolute killing. Everyone was at home gardening

I suppose for some people money does grow on trees!