UBS Entrepreneur Report

A different way of thinking - Turning crisis into opportunity

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There’s no time like a crisis for revealing people’s true colors; the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Although it is primarily a huge health crisis, the pandemic’s economic fall-out is also severe. It is challenging entrepreneurs to act quickly, often to alter the very foundations of their businesses in order to survive and be in a position to prosper again once the pandemic passes.

For our UBS Entrepreneur Report 2020, we interviewed five entrepreneurs about their personal stories, what makes them successful and their tips for handling crises

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Learn from successful stories

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“Fall down seven times; get up eight”

Just months before the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in early 2020, Jorge Cortell’s computational bioinformatics company, Kanteron, presented a paper on monitoring epidemics at a conference in Bangkok, Thailand. It is therefore no surprise that demand for the bioinformatics company’s software has grown swiftly since.

However, the company has had to adapt to some disruption in procurement and payment processes…

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A fury against the crisis of fashion waste

Travelling across China, Cambodia, the Philippines and Nepal to pull impoverished people’s teeth and write freelance feature articles is an unusual start for an entrepreneur. But it alerted Christina Dean to Asia’s burgeoning crisis in environmental waste. What started as curiosity became confusion and then fury. She had to act.

The crisis has made Christina into a real entrepreneur, she asserts, and has forced her to make hard choices…

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Leading through adversity

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a trying time for SellAnyCar.com; it has required every bit of the resilience and emotional intelligence Saygin learned as a child. After the virus flared up in the United Arab Emirates and other parts of the Middle East in March of 2020, SellAnyCar.com’s monthly sales dropped by 90%.

“When you lose 90% of your business, that’s when leadership really counts…"

Want to know more about how these entrepreneurs dealt with the crisis?

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