Author(s)

Zidong Huang, Ziye Huang, Yang Zhou

Corresponding Author

Zidong Huang

ABSTRACT

From the first quarter of 2020, the pandemic has influenced the catering industry heavily. Many firms and organizations had no choice but to exit the market, while others used different commercial strategies to recover from this outbreak. This paper investigates the leading firms in the catering industry deeply during the past years, trying the get a clear picture about the recovery of the catering industry. And we measure the level of recovery of each firm by calculating the difference between the expected performance of the firm based on its past operating history before the pandemic to the actual performance after the Covid-19. We find out that the market sales of the industry are not recovered yet without any clear trend to increase, but the profitability does regenerate, despite the polarized level among different firms. About half of firms have net profits higher than expected in the past half-year, but another half has lower. We then studied several firms with good performance on the profitability and generalized four main methods they used to have a successful business in the new post-covid era. Although some of the factors that the companies could not control boost their successes, these four techniques could be widely applied throughout the industry to help all firms have a rapid and robust recovery under the normalization of the pandemic.

KEYWORDS

Catering Industry, Covid-19, Chinese Economy, Economy Recovery, Pandemic Normalization