A study on strategy selection of it companies in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis

The spread of COVID-19 disease, which affects the whole world, has focused the attention of policy makers primarily on saving people's lives. With its primary threat to human life, the pandemic crisis also threatens the survival of firms on a global scale, with potentially devastating social and economic consequences. The aim of this study is to determine the strategies adopted by information technology companies as a result of the pressure, threats and opportunities they face in the difficult economic conditions caused by the pandemic crisis due to the COVID-19 global epidemic that emerged in 2019 and to evaluate the adopted strategies. In the study, strategic responses of IT companies to the pandemic crisis are examined and discussed by two different data collection methods on the basis of strategy and crisis literature: An exploratory research survey, which aims to collect preliminary information that will help define information such as the environmental conditions of the companies and how they are affected by the crisis and an interview study, which aims to obtain information that will help to understand the strategic responses of the companies. As a result of the study, strategic responses to the pandemic crisis were determined. The findings show that the strategic awareness of the companies serving in the IT sector is low and the strategic responses given are not very diverse. It has been observed that companies follow almost the same approaches to deal with a crisis. It has been determined that firm sizes do not play an important role in the approaches to the crisis, the majority of the firms are almost not affected by the economic negativities caused by the crisis, and they mostly follow a stability strategy on the basis of reorganization/restructuring. Findings that companies tend to follow a related product diversification strategy to change their fields of activity are also evaluated in the conclusion and recommendations section. In the light of these answers, it is aimed to provide a roadmap on how information companies can cope with the uncertainty caused by such global crises.