The Unheralded, Biggest Winners from the Work from Home Revolution
If you want to work from home for the rest of your life, you need to start shooting out resumes to Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR, Rated “C”), Facebook, Inc. (Nasdaq: FB, Rated “C+”), Square, Inc. (NYSE: SQ, Rated “D+”) and/or Shopify Inc. (NYSE: SHOP, Rated “D+”).
All of those companies, plus many more, have announced that big chunks of their workforce will be able to work from home even after the pandemic is behind us.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that as much of 50% of the company’s workforce will be working remotely.
Twitter made a similar announcement, with their chief HR officer Jennifer Christie saying: “If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen.”
And Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke made the following statement:
Until recently, work happened in the office. We’ve always had some people remote, but they used the internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your work from home setup.
With all of this said, don’t make the mistake of assuming that you have to work for a Silicon Valley company to become a work-from-home warrior.
According to a Gartner survey of 317 CFOs, almost a quarter said that they expect to move at least 20% of their on-site employees to telecommute.
Permanently!
Moreover, 74% of those CFOs plan to permanently shift some of their employees to remote work after the COVID-19 crisis is over.
That’s a monumental change. And any time such a change occurs in an industry, there is going to be mountains of money spent.
A survey from Enterprise of 1,300 top American executives found that 21% are increasing their IT budgets to accommodate work from home employees.
That means they are buying them home computers, workstations, cybersecurity solutions, video conferencing services, higher speed internet connectivity, transcription software, communication headsets, printers/scanners and other kids of software … to start.
The companies at the receiving end of all that corporate IT largess are enjoying an avalanche of new business. Like who?
The obvious winners — like Zoom (Nasdaq: ZM, Ratings “C-”), Slack (NYSE: WORK, Rated “D”) and Box Inc. (NYSE: BOX, Rated “D”) — have already shot up in value.
But I wouldn’t buy them until they give back some of their recent gains.
It’s clear, though, that the Wall Street crowd has overlooked the most important part of the work from home food chain, which is the huge increase in internet traffic. Companies who profit from increased internet traffic, such as providers and online advertisement firms, should be seeing a big increase in profits.
For those companies, business has never been better. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Best wishes,
Tony Sagami
