Tabla de contenidos para May 2020 en Fortune

THE PHYSICAL BARRIERS of the largest lockdown in human history started coming down in Wuhan, China, on April 8. By the time shops opened, and some of the city’s 11 million residents ventured out, authorities had introduced a more modern method for isolating those at risk of infection. At checkpoints throughout the city, police and security guards demanded residents present a QR code on their mobile phones that rates the user’s coronavirus risk level. Green codes granted unrestricted movement. A yellow code required seven days of quarantine. Red meant 14 days of quarantine. Local governments created the algorithms behind the ratings at the behest of China’s State Council and rolled them out in Wuhan and hundreds of other cities on apps hosted by China’s largest tech companies, Alibaba, Tencent,…

IN MARCH, FRENCH PRESIDENT Emmanuel Macron went on national television from the Élysée Palace and told his countrymen that in the fight against the coronavirus, “We are at war.” Three days later, Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of French oil giant Total, delivered to his roughly 100,000 employees a video message about the energy rout that was no less blunt. The price of oil had collapsed, “halving our share price,” noted the visibly pale CEO, speaking from the Total Tower in Paris into a microphone he was clutching in his right hand, in the style of a talk-show life coach. To stanch the bleeding, Total for 2020 would slash its capital spending more than 20%, nearly triple its planned cuts in operating expenses, and suspend share buybacks. But one thing…

THIS PAST JANUARY, as word of a deadly new virus began filtering out of China, the business lounge at Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar, was teeming with people, coming and going from almost every point on the planet. Facing a long layover on a reporting trip, I poured some tea and sank into an armchair. Nothing, it seemed, could disturb such serenity. Ten days later, our family took a weekend trip from Paris to Kraków, Poland. Why not? The taxi to the airport cost more than the tickets on low-cost airline EasyJet—the ninth carrier I had flown in 12 months. Today that seems like a lost world—and it will not be simple to find a way back to it. The ambient-lit Doha business lounge, with its hot showers…

IT MAY BE A MISNOMER to call anyone in retail a “winner” right now, when stay-at-home and social-distancing measures have shut down hundreds of thousands of U.S. stores and threatened consumers’ spending for the foreseeable future. But look at the few chains that have managed relatively well in this chaotic time, and you’ll gather clues about what it will take to come out ahead in the industry, both now and long after the virus has been contained. Walmart’s U.S. sales reportedly jumped 20% in March as people stocked up on essentials—further boosted by a 190% increase in monthly downloads of its online grocery app, according to data tracker App Annie. Nike kept its China business from stalling, thanks to a fitness app that helped homebound consumers do quarantine workouts.…

MOST ENTREPRENEURS DREAM of having an unexpected flood of new users. For Eric Yuan, the 50-year-old founder and CEO of Zoom, adding 90,000 schools—and having to educate them on how to use his product—has become a bit of a nightmare. “We thought their IT teams could help, but we were wrong,” he says in an early April interview over Zoom. “We are like the IT team for them.” It’s hard to feel too sorry for him. After all, he is a multibillionaire several times over. He leads one of the few companies whose prospects have soared as a result of the pandemic. Still, Yuan looks drained, his face wan against the backdrop of a glimmering—and fake—image of the Golden Gate Bridge, a standard option in his product’s “choose virtual…

To those on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis, it’s ultimately about fear. “People are terrified,” says Kathryn Lott, executive director of Houston’s Southern Smoke Foundation, a crisis relief organization for people in the food and beverage industry. “All are afraid they will lose their homes, and the terror in their voices is something I have never experienced. I have done casework for years, during natural disasters, people who have been gunned down, new mothers on the streets with infants during winter. I have never heard this.” No one has ever heard this, the pleas for help from so many Americans rendered jobless with stunning suddenness—more than 16 million and counting as of early April. For them, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered intertwined crises of personal health and…

FOR MARCY FISHER, one of the global pandemic’s biggest and most urgent recent headaches involved a small piece of elastic. On March 20, Fisher, a Ford Motor lifer who normally oversees the automaker’s global body exterior and interior engineering, became one of about 200 Ford executives and employees facing an urgent new mandate: How could the country’s largest automakers, their massive production lines idled by the threat of spreading infections, pivot into producing desperately needed medical supplies? Crosstown rival General Motors had already jumped into action, hammering out a partnership with ventilator specialist Ventec Life Systems. Ford CEO Jim Hackett and his deputies consulted with experts at the Mayo Clinic, a medical supplier, and the White House, which was agitating—loudly—for the automakers to get involved. Soon they were strategizing…

THE CORONAVIRUS RECESSION has left no industry untouched, but the restaurant business is arguably the hardest hit so far. The food and beverage sector accounted for 60% of the jobs lost in March, the first wave of the tsunami that has since prompted 16.8 million Americans to apply for unemployment. The impact on those workers foreshadows a supersize blow to the economy at large. The restaurant industry—which includes five chains large enough to appear in the Fortune 500—contributes an estimated 4% of the U.S. GDP, or roughly $1 trillion. To get a sense of the ways in which the industry has been impacted—and how it might ultimately pick up the pieces, Fortune spoke to three restaurateurs, each leading a very different type of establishment. $150 BILLION Estimated cash flow…

IN AUGUST 2019, barely half a year before the world changed, the pharmaceutical industry was the most disliked business sector in America: 58% of those polled by Gallup had a negative perception of the industry, more than twice the share who viewed it favorably—giving drugmakers a net positive score of minus 31, the worst by far of any business sector in the country. For comparison, airlines and the legal profession had net positive scores of plus 19 and plus 5, respectively. Even the federal government (minus 27) had better ratings overall. Enter the coronavirus. As much as the pandemic has devastated many industries, it has offered Big Pharma a chance to shine as never before, winning back the trust of a public infuriated with years of soaring drug prices. Will…

O THE ROBOTS ARE MESMERIZING. Inside a warehouse in Erith, on the outskirts of East London, more than a thousand of them glide across a vast steel and aluminum grid. Each is the size and shape of an office copy machine, topped with stubby antennae and a shining neon-green LED. Following individual routes, they whiz off, accelerating at rates rivaling those of a Ferrari. They stop on a dime, reverse, shoot left or right, or momentarily pause to allow fellow robots to pass—a meticulously choreographed electric ballet. The robots’ grid is actually the top of a giant three-dimensional lattice—a modular cage packed with groceries. Each time a robot stops, it drops a clawlike attachment into the bowels of the lattice (“the hive,” as human workers call it), descending as…

SAMSUNG TOOK an unusual precaution when it held a splashy event in San Francisco during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, before the city issued a “shelter in place” order. The tech giant hired a startup to install a sci-fi-inspired system to scan conference attendees for fevers. Hundreds of people going to the event had to walk past a high-resolution thermal camera that is supposed to detect body temperatures with an accuracy of within one-half a degree Fahrenheit. A laptop running software interpreted the data and alerted a technician when anyone had an above-average temperature, a potential symptom of a COVID-19 infection, so the person could be pulled aside for additional screening. The company that supplied the technology, CrowdRx, declined to say whether it had identified anyone at the…

THE DIVE INTO THE RED was sudden and across-the-board. As the coronavirus crisis escalated, U.S. stocks plunged from an all-time high on Feb. 19 into a bear market. To put the historic reversal in perspective, we crunched the numbers for all 24 of the S&P 500 industry categories compared with the past two market collapses. SO FAR, this year has already featured the worst month for stocks (March) since October 2008 and the best week (early April) since 1974. But as chaotic and painful as the market swoon has been, it hasn’t yet surpassed the last major meltdown. Only one industry has plunged further from its high than it did during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009—energy, thanks to an oil price war this spring between Russia and…

FOR THE PAST DECADE, the big U.S. banks have endured arduous annual Federal Reserve “stress tests” gauging their strength to weather another Great Recession–like crisis. Critics groused that forcing financial titans to build gigantic war chests—modeled to withstand a replay of double-digit joblessness and an eight-point drop in GDP—was unnecessarily cautious. But, lo and behold, banks are suddenly confronted with a scenario even worse than the regulators’ worst case. “The banks were kicking and screaming while the government made them build capital and liquidity,” says Mike Mayo, an analyst with Wells Fargo. “But that’s why they’re in such good shape today.” Indeed, the stress-test policy appears absolutely crucial now, given the damage that the coronavirus pandemic is unleashing on Wall Street. From the start of 2020 through early April,…

TOM LYNCH hadn’t expected the world to change—or at least his perception of it—at his Tuesday morning leadership meeting. He had expected to talk about the fiscal year 2021 budget and maybe to get to know his team a little better. It was Feb. 25, and Lynch was just four weeks into the job as director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, so new that as he walked the halls of the Hutch that morning he struggled to find the right conference room. Lynch had also made time on the meeting’s agenda for Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at the prestigious Seattle-based research institute who had been tracking the novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 since early January. Lynch describes Bedford as “very humble” and “understated,” but that morning, as the…