Majorty expects severe impact on current business

POPAI and Shop!* chapters keep in touch and the member organizations are constantly informing each other about the consequences of the virus situation, with particular regard to the development of the Retail, the FMCG sector and the instore industry. POPAI UK&Ireland coordinated a survey using a central questionnaire to assess the impact of the pandemic on the industry by mid-April.

„The world is not a familiar place for anyone at the moment and although we can’t change that, we are hoping that the feedback from this survey will help to give a bit of context on the impact to the industry.” says Karen Sentinella, Research Manager.

POPAI Global Research

The overall findings clearly show a great deal of negative impact, and future concern for the in-store industry. 79% of all respondents say there is a severe or less severe impact on current business.

Only 8% of respondents view the virus situation with positive expectations. While the majority fears forced labor cuts, they hope for the impact of government rescue packages. It is important to note that during the response period, from 6 to 18 April, the crisis management economic measures were still published with little specificity.

Canceling orders and deferring payments is a concern

On average, 90% of respondents indicated that they had experienced delays and cancellations in contracts and orders.

There are very big differences between the responding countries in how they consider this to be serious in terms of their business. Argentina, New Zealand and China are most worried, the US and Japan the least. It should be reiterated that the US was still in an early pandemic phase at the time of the response.

Many countries did not want to reschedule supplier invoices at all during the period under review (green). In other countries – South Africa, France, Mexico – however, all bill payments were to be suspended immediately or within 1-3 months.

* POPAI, from 2015 named Shop! is an international organization of the Marketing and Retail industry which headquarters placed in Chicago and Hollywood Florida, representing nearly 2000 local offices. Hungary joined with the POPAI Hungary Association in 2003, which has since then been a nonprofit professional, educational, research and knowledge transfer organisation active mainly in the FMCG sector. Read more: popai.hu