Coming, not coming

We can’t be sure at all about what is waiting for us in September. Just like it was the case with the first eight months, we can’t tell in advance what is going to happen in the last few months of the year, and there aren’t trends or models that we could use to help us. We must make plans for the next year – but based on what? Based on what happened in 2019 or based on the 2020 performance in proportion to the previous year? May be there is a third scenario? Plus let’s not forget that there is also a difference between the various segments, as HoReCa is a sector that can’t bounce back and most FMCG manufacturers and wholesalers aren’t only present in the retail but also in the HoReCa sector.

As the saying goes, you have to look for what is good in everything, and it is true that even in this situation there are good things or things that seem to be good, for instance whatever happens we can just shrug our shoulders, because no one can say ‘See, I told you so!’…because they can’t know either, they can just feel things at best, which will prove to be either correct or wrong.

Let’s take a look at a couple of good things. We are better at home office work, we can now do everything online without any problem, there are meeting and business negotiations, and we also learned multitasking – almost as well as our children. Numerous companies have realised how simply they can cut costs, e.g. with a smaller or a closed office. There is even greater emphasis on food safety and packaging than before, on the one hand because of health protection, on the other hand simply because that is what shoppers want. There are niche products or special product variants that much more shoppers are buying than before, because they are working from home. Many are forced to try new business models or to introduce new services, while others have started a new business at their company to make up for their lost revenues to a certain extent, at the same time also increasing the firm’s stability and opening new horizons…I could continue, but I am sure that you could also come up with another ten examples and this is good – because we can see that besides the hardships there are also valuable new elements in the system, which can stay with us in the future when life hopefully gets back to normal.

Right now we are in the middle of August but we are already thinking about September, as we are focusing on the Business Days conference, where we will be discussing all of the topics mentioned above between 22 and 25 September in Hotel Pelion in Tapolca – at least this is the plan right now and we hope that in the next issue of our magazine we will be writing about what happened there.

With the present issue we were preparing for the Business Days, filling more than 200 pages with many different topics – this is the longest issue in the history of Trade magazin.

I wish you a good time reading Trade magazin and I am looking forward to meeting you at the trade’s biggest conference, the Business Days, at the end of September.

Zsuzsanna Hermann, Editor in Chief