Equity Strategy Q Series: Future Reimagined: Propelled to The Thinking Economy

In the last few months, as consumers changed buying patterns, producers made do with fewer workers, employees worked from home and governments used data to fight the pandemic—each learnt lessons that will dramatically accelerate the nature of spending away from the material to the intellectual. E-commerce, AI, augmented reality, health tech, cloud technologies, automation of non-industrial sectors, will all take a quantum leap with strong positive implications across software, education, medical technologies and discretionary spending, among others.

Along with spending becoming dematerialized, other, less positive, forces may also pivot off the current slump to gain momentum. These include globalisation entering deep stasis, and policy running out of room to buffer future shocks. Rising taxes and increased regulation are likely to emerge to bridge the increased gap between the disruptors and disrupted, consistent with The Thinking Economy's increased emphasis on sustainability and the stakeholder. Declining income will be a problem for the ageing shareholder, but from the pandemic we could see the birth of a positive long-term outcome which may seem surprising at this difficult time.

Powered by UBS Evidence Lab datasets and navigated by key signposts, our team of 170 global sector analysts dig deep to identify businesses across 37 industries that should be most/least favoured by these Megatrends.

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