Just look at cruise liner Carnival, which was recently forced to pay lenders 11.5% a year in order to secure $4bn (£3.28bn) of financing. The future has been an unwelcome early arrival for highly geared companies in sectors that were already struggling.
On a less positive note, taking on debt is a way of borrowing from the future – that is to say, obtaining money now that you will have to give back in future (plus interest). Many parents will be hoping this subscription is temporary but good luck to them telling their children they intend to cut their unlimited access to Frozen 2. Surely nobody at Disney in their wildest dreams could have wished (upon a star) that they would have more than 50 million subscribers in the first five months since launch – for context, Netflix had racked up 160 million subscribers by January 2020. Taking the example of Disney, the entertainment giant invested billions of dollars in its new Disney Plus platform in response to the rise of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video – reflecting the company’s belief that online streaming will be key to the future of entertainment. Over the coming years, it will be fascinating to see which changes forced by COVID-19 will become permanent and which will be merely a short-term adjustment. “The trends that are underway anyway – the growing dependence on technology, the weakening of international bodies like the UN, the shift of economic powers to Asia – these are all going to move forward more rapidly now.” Permanent changes? “In a crisis, history tends to accelerate,” former head of MI6 John Sawers recently observed. Working from home has, for example, proved to be perfectly effective in many of the UK’s service industries and surely the practice will be more common after we are all released from lockdown. I can remember much more Dr Seuss than I can Mr Shakespeare – although I am sure you are much more cultured than I am. So how is this relevant? In his recent article COVID and Forced Experiments, tech and media guru Benedict Evans argues the COVID-19 lockdown has forced all of us to try new things and some of these, just as with green eggs and ham, we might just find we like. I do not like them Sam I am, I do not like green eggs and ham. I challenge you to recite as much of Dr Seuss’s classic ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ as you can remember.
0 kommentar(er)
