Managing Financial Performance toward Achievements in Sustainability Prospects: Comparative Analysis of the e-Commerce and Hospitality Industries

Abstract

The recent pandemic has been identified as a driver of one of the most severe socio-economic crises over the last few decades. While some sectors have experienced an expansion, others have struggled with a changed business environment. The aim of this research is to simultaneously examine the financial performance and sustainability of the e-commerce and hospitality industries, applying asset and debt ratio analysis to the top five companies in the world from each sector in the time period from 2017 to 2022. The results indicate that the assessed companies demonstrated the ability to successfully manage some of their assets. The debt ratio analysis implies that the assessed companies in the hotel industry have reshaped their capital structure, increasing their reliance on debt in 2020 and 2021 to finance their assets. On the contrary, the selected e-commerce companies were found on average to rely less on debt to finance assets. In accordance with expectations, the differences across the examined sectors and companies that have been observed are mostly in regard to the lower scale of utilization of fixed assets to generate turnover, and in terms of the increased share of debts used to finance assets in the hotel industry, which was among the first and hardest hit by the pandemic. Consequently, the study allows policy makers to identify distinctive strategies for each area of economic activity.