E-commerce, IT, telecom and pharma buck lockdown trend, stay resilient

Despite rising Covid-19 cases and a deepening economic gloom, lifestyle changes effected in the past six months have resulted in a few sectors bucking the trend. Confined indoors, people veered towards over-the-top (OTT) platforms and ordering everything online.

E-commerce was one of the sectors to witness steady demand during the lockdown, when even manufacturing took a hit. After teething troubles with logistics and movements of trucks along highways, e-commerce sites saw orders pouring in. Around June, analysts had said the bulk of the orders were for small-ticket items, but the pandemic is expected to help the sector.

The festival season is expected to push up the annual gross merchandise value of e-commerce firms to around $38 billion, almost a 40 per cent growth rate year-on-year.

It’s also a sector that is on a hiring spree. Flipkart has said it will help generate 70,000 direct and millions of indirect seasonal jobs during the festivals.

As people stayed home, they also consumed huge volumes of data for office work, online schooling and entertainment. Telecom has thus been an outlier as data traffic surged. OTT players had to switch their services to standard definition and the high definition network choked. The enterprise business segment, too, soared thanks to work from home (WFH) trends.

India’s data consumption (March-July) grew 947 per cent over pre-Covid times. According to internet exchange DE-CIX, data consumption on OTT and video-on-demand platforms rose by 249 per cent during March-April over February.

While e-commerce and telecom growth are driven by discounts and the imperative to avoid crowds, Indian IT is a sector that has shown resilience.

Its adaptability to a workplace-independent model, growing demand for cloud migration and increasing digitisation spends have helped it tide over the pandemic. Leading service providers achieved 75 per cent WFH of their global manpower within weeks. Top-rung players in India achieved over 92 per cent WFH. Companies such as TCS are also confident of ending FY21 with revenue growth.

Drugs and pharmaceuticals, too, have seen stable demand, especially in the chronic segment. In March, pharma sales grew 9 per cent despite supply disruption as people bought medicines for chronic illnesses in panic. Cardiac medicines saw 20 per cent growth in March, and stabilised subsequently with supplies easing. Growth muted in June and July and was -2.2 per cent in August. Chronic segments like cardiac continued strong growth — posting 11.5 per cent last month.