Covid-19 pandemic’s effects on small and medium enterprises (smes) challenges and responses the case of a selection group of smes in erbil
Abstract
Student Name: Vilia Salim Shamoon
Many studies have been published internationally about the COVID-19 pandemic which affected both human beings and the businesses around the world, the virus affected the health of people and many of them died, and it affected the businesses financially and many of the businesses around the world have been collapsed. The project used a face-to-face interview method for the purpose of collecting data and building a theory which is called inductive, 13 of the questions have been used to ask the participants and during the interview process the researcher used to ask other questions and this leads the project to be a semi-structured interview, the project targeted 12 SMEs but only 10 of them have been taken and used in the project because of giving valid and sufficient information that can be used for analyzing. The QDA Miner software program which is about analyzing qualitative collected data have been used. The data have been analyzed and it shows that COVID-19 pandemic affected negatively on the all of the 10 participants and affected their customer’s number, buying behavior, and financial state, the word frequency analyzing also shows that the word customers have been used the most because the customers were the main reason that leads the SMEs to be negatively affected and if there are no customers it means that there are no sales or profit.
