MindRush 2021: How companies 'rebuilt' businesses amid Covid-19 crisis
How different industries fared amid the pandemic? CEOs discuss 'rebuilding businesses' on Day 2 of Business Today MindRush 2021
Manoj Sharma | January 23, 2021 | Updated 15:31 IST
(From left) Suresh Narayanan, CMD, Nestle; Ravinder Takkar, MD & CEO, Vodafone Idea; and Patu Keswani, CMD, Lemon Tree Hotels
Lockdown hit some industries very badly. While some companies gained, some were hit severely. Some saw demand rising soon after the lockdown in March 2020 and taper off later. So to see how different industries fared amid the pandemic, CEOs discussed 'rebuilding businesses' on Day 2 of BT MindRush 2021.
On the destruction Covid-19 infused lockdown caused to the hotel industry, Patu Keswani, CMD, Lemon Tree Hotels, said he didn't anticipate it to be so terrible earlier in February. "But in March, we took a lot of steps to stop revenue destructions. We have a plan for events like this. In our response to this revenue destruction -- considering around 75 percent of our hotels are owned by us plus we had operationalised about $200 or 250 million worth of investment in the previous year, of which $150 million was incremental debt -- we asked ourselves three questions. What are the boundaries in which we'll operate? Our response was that we'll not lay off over 8,002 of our employees. Second was to have a cash cushion not only to our debt obligation, regulatory or payroll, but also to pay our small vendors. So we identified three levels of destruction -- 40%, 60% and 80%."