Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 on Firm Performance : Evidence from Indian FMCG and Consumer Durables Sectors

The recent pandemic has been the greatest catastrophic event in the last century that has left its irrevocable effect on the socio-economic and cultural environment. The purpose of the present paper is to enfold the early impact of COVID-19 on the stock performance, dividend payout capability (DPC), sales and operational performance (SOP), financial stability (FS) and economic sustainability (ES) of selected fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) and consumer durables (CD) firms in India. A total of 30 firms (i.e., decision making units or DMUs) have been considered out of which 25 are from the FMCG sector and rest 5 belong to the CD sector. The total study period spans from FY 2013-14 to FY 2020-21. A combined multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework of logarithmic percentage-change driven objective weighting (LOPCOW) and evaluation is based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method is applied. For aggregation of MCDM rankings popular methods like Borda count (BC) and Copeland methods have been applied. The validity of the result is checked through a comparison with another popular method such as Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS). We have noticed that the relative positions (while assessing stock performance, DPC and SOP) vary notably during the early post-pandemic period (FY 20-21). It is further noticed that the DMUs which held top positions prior to COVID-19 suffer more afterward than the bottom performers. However, there has not been any major effect of COVID-19 on firms’ financial health and long-term growth prospect