The performance of companies with Platform business model and IoT companies after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Abstract

While the first two paragraphs of this thesis present a literature review on the business model “platform” and on the IoT, the main aim of the study is to understand how companies adopting such a business model “platform” and companies having a focus on Internet of Things technologies have reacted in terms of performances to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to do so, data on the market capitalizations of 84 companies have been collected and the resulting sample has been divided along two dimensions. First, companies were classified based on the business model adopted, and for the sake of the research work four categories have been identified: innovation platforms, transaction platforms, hybrid platforms and non-platforms. Second, the same sample of companies have been divided in two macro categories based on whether they exhibit a focus on IoT technologies or not. For each of the company of the sample monthly data on their market capitalization were collected from February 2020 to January 2021. And to better analyze how platforms and IoT companies coped with the Covid crise, the growth rates of the market caps (from February 2020) have been calculated. After having analyzed the performances of each category of company identified by utilizing the average growth rates, a reason is sought for the different performances of these various categories, which are sometimes striking.