Coronavirus Has Made These Brands More Valuable Than Ever

A major crisis has a funny way of clarifying things for the general public. Suddenly, what’s most important to you becomes crystal clear, with the desire to see you and your family through hardships safely and in good health.

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The coronavirus pandemic has had a major impact on how people shop–with significant increases in online shopping–and which brands they’ll trust and buy. With economic hardships such as job loss and remote work affected people’s income and financial security, many people have turned to brands that they trust to deliver the services they need.

The pandemic has also shifted the kinds of products and services that people consume, with an emphasis on cloud and web-based companies, those that enable easy online shopping or curbside pickup.

Here’s which brands are getting even bigger during the pandemic. 

Last updated: March 29, 2021

• March 12, 2020, close price: $155.44
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $183.29
• % change in stock price: 17.92%

With sanitation and cleaning a major focus of the past year, this household cleaning company’s familiar brand was a trusted source of products that anxious people knew they could count on.

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• March 12, 2020, close price: $187.44
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $259.97
• % change in stock price: 38.70%

Being forced to stay home turned people’s attention to aspects of their home that needed some improvement. Home Depot cashed in on an influx of new customers renovating and improving their homes.

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• March 12, 2020, close price: $123.08
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $181.29
• % change in stock price: 47.29%

COVID-19 has ensured the necessity for the kinds of products that McKesson distributes: pharmaceuticals, medical and surgical supplies, and healthcare IT products. As hospitals and health clinics struggle to keep people well, these supplies are in greater demand that ever.

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• March 12, 2020, close price: $93.23
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $137.68
• % change in stock price: 47.68%

This publisher of video games couldn’t have picked a better time to be in the business. While the pandemic has decreased revenues for many industries, people have turned to video games as one source of entertainment during shelter-in-place mandates.

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• March 12, 2020, close price: $137.66
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $234.55
• % change in stock price: 70.38%

Microsoft is a brand with durability and trust under its belt even before the pandemic. The company posted record quarterly sales that are likely driven by quarantining people’s desire for video games and increased usage of its cloud-computing services as numerous companies turned to remote work.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $315.25
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $553.41
• % change in stock price: 75.55%

Not only did people stuck inside during public safety lockdowns turn more to their streaming entertainment than ever before, but Netflix just seems to have had its finger on the pulse of the next hot thing, with hits like “The Tiger King,” “The Queen’s Gambit” and Bridgerton, to name a few.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $1,114.91
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $2,095.17
• % change in stock price: 87.92%

Although Google’s parent company, Alphabet, did experience a decline in revenue during the pandemic, it did little to shift the tech company’s stock staying power. In an increasingly web-centered work world, their digital advertising and other tech tools are clearly here to stay.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $1,676.61
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $3,159.53
• % change in stock price: 88.45%

As COVID-19 forced brick-and-mortar stores to shut down or significantly limit their capacity, consumers turned to online shopping to fill in the gaps. Amazon had such a boon on orders, they hired more than 400,000 new employees in the first ten months of the pandemic.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $83.69
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $160.07
• % change in stock price: 91.27%

With more people ordering online than ever before, parcel delivery services like UPS were inundated, especially in the early days of COVID, driving up the demand and share price.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $90.98
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $187.08
• % change in stock price: 105.63%

When many smaller stores were forced to close during the earliest shelter-in-place mandates in many states, Target was one exception, since it sells a variety of essential products, from groceries to home products, toys to clothes, making it an essential place for shoppers. Target also pivoted quickly to offer a variety of contactless ways to shop, including at-home delivery and curbside pick-up.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $96.05
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $260.06
• % change in stock price: 170.75%

The Unites States Postal Service could not keep up with the demand for shipping as consumers turned to online ordering en masse. Services like Fedex took up the slack, benefiting their stock prices.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $96.96
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $266.07
• % change in stock price: 174.41%

As the world retreated indoors during COVID, both in work and personally, PayPal, one of the leading companies in online financial transactions (which also owns Venmo) became more necessary than ever for people to pay and get paid without contact. Its stock price reflected increased usage.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $377.78
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $1,301.15
• % change in stock price: 244.42%

As people lost work due to the pandemic, many began to set up their own side hustles, with online shops. Shopify offers a a do-it-yourself e-commerce platform that lets businesses sell products under their own name instead of being Marketplace sellers on Amazon.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $68.68
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $239.66
• % change in stock price: 248.95%

For a company that does very little other than enabling digital signatures, the timing of the pandemic couldn’t have been better. Remote working made DocuSign’s remote signing function for contracts and other legal documents more crucial than ever.

• March 12, 2020, close price: $109.47
• Feb. 24, 2021, close price: $385.23
• % change in stock price: 251.90%

Of all the companies to profit from the pandemic, none may have done so more than Zoom, the web-based video conferencing company. From work meetings to remote learning to family occasions ranging from funerals to weddings, Zoom has become a centerpiece of most people’s lives and its stock price reflects it.

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Joel Anderson contributed to the reporting for this article. 

Methodology: For this piece GOBankingRates used its own previous article of “Coronavirus Has Made These 100+ Brands More Valuable Than Ever” as inspiration to find 15 brands/companies that COVID has made more valuable than before. For each of the 15 brands, GOBankingRates found: (1) share price (adjusted) as of market close on March 12, 2020 (one day before President Trump declared COVID-19 a National Emergency); (2) share price as of market close on February 24, 2021; (3) percent change in share price between those two dates; and (4) a brief reasoning as to why COVID-19 was specifically responsible for the rise in price. GOBankingRates used Yahoo! Finance for its share price sourcing. All data was collected on and up to date as of February 25, 2021.