​A logistics perspective on how Covid-19 affects the Swedish economy

The Corona pandemic is a unique situation that affects us all, and it has unprecedented effects on the economy. At Unifaun, with a broad share of Swedish companies across the economy using our systems for managing shipments of goods, we took the opportunity to gain a unique insight from a logistics and goods flow perspective in the early phase of the pandemic.

We asked our customers a simple question in week 14: Have you noticed any impact on turnover/sales (due to Covid-19 virus) in the last week vs your plan?

Based on almost 1,000 companies and governmental functions responding there were some interesting insights,

• 54% of eCommerce companies have increased or similar orders as expected, with 25% having a noticeable increase vs plan (and a bit higher among the larger customers)
• 16% of B2B companies (no direct ecommerce sales) and 22% of omnichannel companies saw an order decrease of more than 50% compared than expected
• Still, a very large fraction of the respondents indicated that they saw no major impact yet, with 40% in B2B noticeable

“It was a bit surprising to see that in Sweden, such a high fraction of businesses was not affected yet neither up/nor down in the logistics part of their businesses, especially if we compare to our other markets in The Nordics and Europe. It seems like we were 1-2 weeks behind in development, but on balance the sentiment is pretty negative” says Andreas Randel, Chief Growth Officer.

“Further it will be interesting to see in a couple of weeks time if we follow the same pattern as e.g., Denmark, where ecommerce more broadly increased, when people got used to the “new normal” and moved from only purchasing the obvious necessities as e.g., online pharmacies, food and staples that have seen a massive surge in demand back into a more broader increase of purchasing across all ecommerce categories”