Message from the top: Anil Ramchandani, director, business development, Kachins Group

As companies across the GCC tackle the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, regional business leaders reveal insights on what their organisations are doing and offer advice on how to deal with the current crisis

by Anil Ramchandani

May 12, 2020

The current scenario poses significant challenges for businesses across all sectors all over the world. Every single business is bound to be affected in one way or another.

The most important implication is going to be of job losses (temporary or permanent) and salary cuts that are happening across all the industries. As a result of this, consumer spending would take a big hit, and tourism numbers are also going to drop drastically as a result of travel restrictions.

Our business relies heavily on executives who are local spenders as well as tourists, which is going to surely experience a significant drop. The logical way of dealing with this would then be to restructure our organisation internally to ensure we streamline our processes and have a lean system with only the core and integral staff strength in place.

The best way to assess the current situation is to estimate the cost structure after restructuring, and work towards the minimum sales required to cover these costs. This figure should be reasonable and achievable.

Businesses should be more focused on meeting their costs and obligations and how to best sustain this severe economic downturn that we have ahead of us.

We are in discussions with our suppliers to discuss the existing pricing and terms, and how to help improve flexibility to help us sail through this time. Moreover, additional revenue streams need to be explored to help clients to continue using our goods and services from the comfort of their own homes.

The need of the hour is to have such systems in place for businesses wherever applicable as that will help us reach our clients more quickly and efficiently as people are not comfortable moving around as freely anymore.

Other than that, we have also set up an exclusive division to manufacture uniforms for all kinds of industries but currently, we are prioritising all orders for the healthcare industry to help them with their basic requirements such as high quality masks, scrubs and lab coats, etc.

Along with this, Kachins has also decided to donate 10 per cent of their uniform sales to the healthcare industry as a response to the global fight against Covid-19.

In all, businesses have to support each other in these challenging times to emerge successful and stronger.