On this bleak morning for the market and the world due to the coronavirus, I’m choosing to accentuate the positive:
- Uber isn’t the only business to think delivery will thrive when people are confined to their homes. Shares of Meituan in China have surged as the company has responded to demand there. Publicly traded Grubhub in the U.S., which has faced a withering assault from funny-money-funded competitors, also has revived. (Quartz had a good overview of this.) The point here isn’t so much to celebrate profiteering during a tragedy as to highlight examples of a dynamic market that responds to unanticipated needs.
- Similarwise, much has already been made of the newfound popularity of Zoom Video Communications in a time when travel has been severely restricted. As it happens, the CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, will speak tomorrow night at a Fortune Brainstorm Tech dinner in San Francisco. (Hugs and hand shaking are off limits.) We invited Yuan to speak just before the crisis hit U.S shores and only because the company has been one of the few successful recent tech IPOs. We’ll let you know what he says.
- In China, a product called DingTalk has also exploded in use due to the confinement of so many workers. This review is less than flattering about DingTalk but interesting all the same. DingTalk, by the way, is owned by Alibaba and began as a response to the success of WeChat, owned by Tencent. I visited the DingTalk development team in Hangzhou in 2018, which seems like a lifetime ago.
- I had been wondering if improved hygiene would lead not only to slowed transmission of the novel coronavirus but also a decrease in common flu cases. It turns out that public health officials in Japan think that’s exactly what is happening. A decrease in influenza, which Donald Trump recently learned is a consistent killer, would be a silver lining in this global tragedy.