New Year – let’s tiptoe in!
Do you get the feeling that after the optimism heading into 2021 that it had to be better than 2020 there is a bit more – let’s just tiptoe into 2022 and see what is inside the door- maybe kick the tyres a bit before we commit to it being better or worse or maybe just more of the same rotating menu of the pandemic – the bingo card of adding and taking away rules and restrictions.
The days leading up to New Year had some great memes – people opening the 2022 door a crack and peering in suspiciously and the “I want to see the terms and conditions for 2022 before I sign up to it” were common themes.
But despite all that, there are some potential causes for a bit of optimism. At the date of writing this close to 92% of the eligible population had received two vaccinations and nearly 10% already had booster shots, which will help prevent the spread of Covid, but possibly more importantly reduce the risk of runaway hospitalisations stressing our health system (more than now). Omicron also seems to potentially cause less very severe disease.
Perhaps more importantly for businesses there seems to be an acceptance by both government and the public that we need to get better at living with Covid, with sensible precautions. The traffic light system looks to step away from the total shutdowns and hard borders of the old level system, which will hopefully see better business continuity – especially for our hard-pressed events, hospitality and tourism businesses.
Aside from Covid there will be some new challenges this year – resetting our businesses to deal with interest rate rises and inflation – neither experienced in recent years are some of the obvious ones.
For the automotive sector one challenge will be the growth in EV vehicles – this is not going to go away – over the Christmas period Hyundai announced they were shutting down their research and development section for Internal Combustion engines to focus on EV’s. They will have done a good degree of future development already, but this is reflecting moves by many governments to ban new ICE vehicles somewhere during the 2030’s decade.
The other challenge is likely to be the ongoing disruption to international supply chains which will affect new vehicle and parts supplies.
