I think there are several issues which pandemic has taught us. First of all, this pandemic has brought the corporate finance to its roots. It has demonstrated how important are the companies’ fundamentals to survive the turbulences. Only companies with the resilient fundamentals, bringing the long-term value to the shareholders will be able to survive and recover from the crisis quickly. However, all others will be trying to capture the lifebelt to survive on the surface. Consequently, it might take a long time before they recover, if they will be able to restore its value at all.

Secondly, pandemic has also demonstrated the inefficiency of many corporations. Too high fixed costs, over-employment, operational inefficiency have brought financial results of many companies extremely down. Thus, I find the automatisation and digitalisation process currently happening in many companies as a right direction to reduce highly burdening fixed-costs to eliminate this kind of operational risk.

Finally, the pandemic has also documented how dangerous leverage might be. In fact, low interest rates are very pernicious as they encourage indebtedness and overleveraging. The pandemic has brought a difficult lesson showing that when the cash flows disappear, the debt remains and has to be paid back. Thus, companies with excessive leverage have demonstrated much higher bankruptcy risk. The pandemic might redefine companies’ optimal capital structure towards more optimal leverage.