The emerging resilients: Achieving ‘escape velocity’

In 2019, McKinsey asked companies to prepare for the possibility of a recession. Of course, we had no idea then that the COVID-19 pandemic would be the trigger, nor that the recession would cut as deeply as it has. But it was clear then that the foregoing growth cycle was already of unusual duration. The pace was slowing, furthermore, and the potential for shocks was greater than for renewed growth. In the same article, we discussed what top-performing companies had done in the previous downcycle, the financial crisis of 2008–09. We looked at 1,500 public companies in Europe and the United States, analyzing performance on a sector-by-sector basis. Companies in the top quintile of their peers through that crisis were dubbed the “resilients.”

Once economic and business results of the second quarter of 2020 became known, we began to hunt for the clues that were contained in nearly 1,500 earnings releases across Europe and the United States. This article seeks to understand whether the shape of the next class of resilients is visible in the data, and what lessons this would hold for companies within each sector.

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Πηγή: mckinsey