The Effect of COVID-19 Spread on the E-Commerce Market: The Case of the 5 Largest E-Commerce Companies in the World

Abstract

This paper attempts to investigate the effects of the spread of COVID-19 on global e-commerce companies, where the five largest e-commerce companies in the world were chosen in terms of revenues and market value, and they were as follows: American Amazon, Chinese Alibaba, Japanese Rakuten, German Zalando, United kingdom ASOS, has been Measuring the prevalence of corona virus by "cumulative infections" and "cumulative deaths" on a daily basis. Besides, it is measured through the values of both the "new corona virus cases" and the "new corona virus deaths" daily, the dependent variable reflects the response of the global e-commerce market to the impact of the spread of the corona virus and is measured by the daily returns of the shares of e-commerce companies to the global financial markets. This was applied on a daily basis from 15 March 2020 to 25 May 2020. The results of the descriptive analysis of the returns of the e-commerce companies showed that the companies achieve positive daily returns by calculating the average daily returns. The results of the aggregate model, according to the Beta Standardized Coefficients test, indicate the most important independent variables and an impact on the returns of shares of global electronic trading companies, a variable (total deaths) was the degree of its impact in the first rank, in the second rank a variable (total cases) and in the third variable (new cases). The percentage of the effect of coronavirus spread varied from one company to another, depending on the country to which it belonged, where the American company Amazon and the United kingdom company ASOS were "the cumulative cases of infection are the most influential and this is consistent with that they are the most affected countries of the coronavirus during the period of research, and the Chinese company Alibaba and Rakuten company Japanese “Corona virus cases” were the most influential in their share price returns, and the German company Zalando was the most influential variable “cumulative deaths”.