Fast, furious and focused approach to Covid-19 response: an examination of the financial and business resilience of the UAE logistics industry

While many other countries around the world were struggling to mitigate the immense health and economic effects of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the UAE Government ensured that no shortage of the supplies of goods and services affected the country. This has been attributed to the government’s robust financial support to the supply chain and logistics industry during the pandemic (Atayah et al. 2021). The UAE imports over 90% of its commodities from overseas—including foods, drinks, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, clothing, electronics, building materials, logs, paper, plants, machinery, tools, and raw materials. All these products pass through the operations of the country’s supply chain industry, which depends heavily on the financial institutions. Due to the above assertion, we found it necessary to empirically examine the challenges, threats and successes of the country’s supply chain operators in order to ascertain their financial and business resilience during the pandemic based on the survival strategies and financial resources they received and employed during the unrelenting pandemic. Accordingly, this research has examined the financial and operational resilience of the country’s supply chain organizations as reflected in their ability to maintain efficient financial strategies and stable business operations despite the scourging pandemic. Our initial findings indicate that Covid-19 pandemic interruptions on the nationwide distribution of goods and services in the UAE have been very minimal due to the government’s robust financial support to the logistics industry, and consequently the business resilience developed by the industry operators.