COVID-19 Pandemic and Business Survival as Mediation on the Performance of Firms in the FMCG-Sector

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has become a global issue causing the restriction of people and international trading and it has affected the loss of jobs and closure of firms all over the world. This paper aims to examine COVID-19 pandemic and business survival as a mediation on the performance of firms in the Fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector: insight for the future of business operation. Cross-sectional survey research design was adopted making use of stratified and simple random sampling technique as a guide to select participants while data analysis was subjected to exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation model (SEM). The findings show that COVID-19 pandemic has affected the performance and survival of businesses in Nigeria leading to the loss of jobs, firm productivity, customer retention, increase unemployment rate, closure of businesses and GDP of Nigeria as a whole. The research has been able to provide insight on the need for full integration of technology into all the firm operational process and for the firm to remain flexible to accommodate changes as imposed on the firm’s operations through environmental uncertainties such as the pandemic. The study is the first of its kind to examine the extent of the effect that COVID-19 pandemic have had on the survival, performance of businesses and the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country since its eruption and announcement in China and has been able to provide insight by exposing most organization’s weakness especially with regard to technology-adoption and its integration into all the firm operational capabilities as is the reason why most firm struggle to meets customer needs during the lockdown. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, performance, survival, customer retention, Nigerian economy, GDP