The Novel Coronavirus, also known as COVID-19 has already taken a large chunk out of the global economy. In fact, it is believed that around $1 trillion has already been lost due to people staying at home, and preferring to spend their resources on only essential goods. Because of this, many luxury industries or various other sectors dependant on retail consumers is slowly starting to go under, not only through their stock prices but also the general revenue of the industry as well.

However, COVID-19 is definitely not a “typical” destroyer of markets. For some companies, the virus has been quite helpful in getting more customers, growing their reach to new markets and overall succeeding in the first quarter of 2020.

Let’s take a look at the three industries that have “benefited” from the Novel Coronavirus outbreak the most.

Streaming Services

It takes just a glance at the stock prices of companies such as Netflix to understand just how much this sector is growing thanks to everybody being quarantined at home.

Hundreds of millions of people have pretty much doubled or even tripled their time spent on platforms such as Netflix (NFLX). This gives these companies the opportunity to charge advertisers much more with good reason. Not only has the number of people grown on the platform, but also the collective time spent online.

Any reasonable company that wanted to advertise on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ or any other streaming service would be immediately intrigued despite the horribly rising prices.

IGaming and gaming in general

Once again we are referring to the countless hours that just became free for millions of people staying at home. Fortunately for American companies, most of these people have functioning gaming PCs that are strong enough to run the latest games or consoles that don’t really require a hard disk anymore. However, for the rest of the world, a gaming PC is often a luxury, and some of the largest customer bases are indeed in these countries.

The perfect solution for these people was cloud gaming with Nvidia GeForce. However, the demand seems to have grown so much that Nvidia (NVDA) was forced to suspend several founders’ accounts in order to make room for additional people. It’s safe to say that both Steam and Nvidia are crawling with players right now, in a traffic jam they’ve never seen before.

Those who didn’t have the luxury of either a functioning gaming PC or access to a cloud gaming platform like Nvidia, seem to have shifted over to online platforms that don’t require strong rigs. Multiple companies from the iGaming sector or their original name the gambling industry have reported massive increases in daily logins and activity.

According to Mathew Gridman, the Server Operations Director of Playamo, there are several reasons why there’s such a growth in traffic:

“Over the last two months, we saw a surge of customers from all over the world. First, it started with China where the quarantine was first made mandatory. We immediately identified the opportunity and invested in hardware capable of handling 5 times as much traffic as our previous setup could. It was a great idea. The moment quarantines started becoming mandatory in Europe, we saw traffic almost triple from countries like Italy, Spain, the UK, and even France.

It was quite surprising because we had never had this many people at all. Most of the traffic was completely new customers. It didn’t take out the analytics team to realize that due to the emergency situation in Europe, most people who were devoted offline casino players, had to somehow compensate their favorite entertainment method. Thankfully, our marketing team was there to react to the situation quickly.”

Gridman is not the only online casino employee to mention this phenomenon. Websites from all over the world are reporting increased traffic, larger deposits and more responsible gambling. This may be due to most people being in close proximity to family, which is usually quite against iGaming.

Overall, it’s believed that this quarantine is going to transfer almost half of what offline casinos make on a yearly basis to digital platforms, thus ushering a completely new era of entertainment through games of chance.

Co-working software

Although the majority of the population is now forced to stay at home, this does not mean that everybody’s on vacation. In fact, the majority of the workforce is now forced to work from home, thus allowing most companies to stay afloat until the virus crisis blows over and everything gets back to normal.

We are all aware that every single company depends on the corporations and the co-working of their employees. Staying at home creates a serious issue in that sense s the communication factor between coworkers is simply not as good as face-to-face contact.

Or, it’s simply impossible to incorporate huge meetings of hundreds of people from a single department.

Thankfully though, there is one company that is currently keeping the whole co-working software, or chatting software market afloat right now, and that’s Zoom.

Taking a look at Zoom’s (ZM) stock price, we can see that it was around $70.44 per share in the fourth week of January but now sits at $155.73 per share. That is an around 120% increase within just two months.

Due to Zoom’s 40-minute free meetings the company managed to slightly appeal to most companies in the beginning. But once these 40-minutes were not enough, most corporations were happy enough to pay for unlimited access.

And it’s not just corporations. Universities and schools are massively utilizing Zoom at the moment, making it one of the fastest-growing tech companies of 2020 so far.