Eye on Asia | Bouncing back from coronavirus: Asia’s battle-hardened businesspeople are better prepared than they think

We have had plenty of opportunities to learn from crises across Asia over the past 25 years, and though Covid-19 is different from previous disasters, we will recover from it

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A man wearing a protective mask walks through the Lujiazui financial district in Shanghai. Most of China is now considered low-risk and should return to normal work and life, Premier Li Keqiang said. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 10:00pm, 12 Apr 2020Updated: 8:23am, 13 Apr 2020

You’re not really an “experienced” businessperson until you have led your organisation through a crisis. You don’t even have to come out the other side alive to have learned so much more, as they say, than they teach you at Harvard Business School. Fortunately – or unfortunately – businesspeople around Asia have had plenty of opportunities to become experienced in the past 25 years.

The Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. The 2004 tsunami, which devastated parts of Indonesia and Thailand, among other places. Wall Street’s meltdown in 2008. Fukushima in 2011. Super-typhoon Haiyan in 2013. China’s market meltdown of 2015. I’m sure I’ve missed a couple. The oil price rout of 2015-2016 made plenty of oil and gas managers experienced in a hurry.

Some were natural, some “man-made”. Fukushima was both – earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident – though largely confined to Japan. All had an economic impact that pushed financial systems to stressful extremes.

But Covid-19 is different. It’s a natural disaster leading to an economic disaster, both of which are global. Nobody from the country next door, let alone on the other side of the planet, is in much of a position to send money, aid or people to rescue anyone else.

Health professionals and scientists will somehow carry us through the natural disaster, with more or less help from governments and international organisations. Eschewing politics, frontline doctors and scientists are collaborating openly across borders to solve a problem.

But businesspeople around the region, as they rebuild from the economic disaster, probably won’t receive much help beyond what they get from their home governments. Not that this won’t be substantial in some places, but repeats of, say, the International Monetary Fund putting out localised fires in 1998, or China’s big, stimulating infrastructure build of 2008 onwards don’t seem likely.