By Liz Hoffman and Jennifer Maloney

The coronavirus pandemic brought the global economy to a screeching halt this spring, sparking fears of a corporate bloodbath. As the year ends, it's clear that the crisis has rewired the economy in surprising ways and served up unexpected opportunities for some big businesses to prosper.

Dog hiking vests and festive sweaters for pet lizards flew off the shelves at PetSmart Inc. Universal Pictures embraced the rise of streaming and reset Hollywood's balance of power. Neiman Marcus came out of bankruptcy with a clean slate and new money from Wall Street. Salesforce.com Inc.'s CEO tired of Zoom calls, then agreed to pay $27.7 billion to own Slack, a tool to connect remote office workers, a big bet on a permanently changed workplace.

"We've had 10 years worth of change in 10 months," said Rajeev Misra, CEO of the Softbank Vision Fund, the world's biggest technology investor. He went into the crisis worried the market would leave his startups for dead, only to ride a record stock-listing boom to big gains.

The biggest companies, in many cases, were the ones that came out on top. They slashed their workforces. They cut costs and re-routed their supply chains. Investors plugged financial holes, encouraged by central bankers who lowered borrowing rates and flooded the global economy with cash. Consumers quickly got back to spending money, shifting their dollars online and replacing dinners out with at-home cocktails and overseas vacations with local getaways.

The tactics that helped many corporate titans thrive -- laying off thousands of workers, going deep into debt, and grabbing market share from struggling competitors -- will shape the recovery for months, if not years.

Moreover, even as vaccines begin to be deployed, the pandemic and its fallout continue. The death count keeps rising, and food banks continue to report heavy use. Small businesses have been battered and millions of Americans remain without jobs. Some pivots might yet turn out to be short-sighted, some predictions overly optimistic. November's retail sales slowed as infections surged, a sluggish start for the holiday shopping season. In recent weeks, giants like Coca-Cola Co. and General Electric Co. have outlined plans to cut more jobs.

But corporate profits have snapped back. So have stock prices.

"I would have never guessed that I would be telling you this story today, " Toll Brothers Inc. CEO Doug Yearley said in an interview last week. "Back in March, we were all scared. We were scared personally, and we were scared for our business."

During the last economic crisis, in 2008, the housing market crashed. This time buyers queued up in virtual open houses for new Toll Brothers developments in Boise, Idaho, and the Atlanta suburbs, spurred by falling mortgage rates and a desire for space.

At the end of June, stock analysts were projecting a 25% drop in the third-quarter profits of the companies in the S&P 500 index, according to FactSet. Their actual profits fell just 6%. Gains in health care, consumer goods and technology compensated for sharp declines among energy and industrial sectors.

When Neiman Marcus Group Inc. sold a 7-carat diamond ring in April to a customer who had never seen it in person, its chief executive glimpsed a new hope for the embattled luxury retailer. Neiman Marcus had temporarily closed its stores but top customers were still opening their wallets.

Fashion houses kept shipping to the high-end chain even after it closed its stores in March, furloughed many of its 14,000 workers in April and filed for bankruptcy in May. "Not only the customers but the brands supported us," said CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck. "Then it was a question of how quickly we could reopen the stores."

Neiman Marcus emerged from bankruptcy protection in September with fresh financial backing from big investors. It has reopened all of its 40 remaining stores, including Bergdorf-Goodman in New York City.

Easy Money

Royal Caribbean Group stopped sailing in March and started packing financial sandbags. "You could never be too rich, too thin or too liquid, " CEO Richard Fain told his board of directors. The cruise operator borrowed from banks and sold new bonds to investors as it burned about $300 million a month, its ships in harbor and its reputation under fire. By October, it had laid off or furloughed 23% of its U.S. shoreside employees and repatriated more than 44,000 crew members to their home countries.

A bottomless well of investor cash kept companies like Royal Caribbean alive as revenue vanished. Ford Motor Co. in April set out to raise around $3 billion and ended up with $8 billion. Boeing Co. sought federal aid -- a rescue that would likely have made the U.S. Treasury a major shareholder -- then changed its mind and raised $25 billion from bondholders with far fewer strings attached.

Investors put a record $11 trillion to work this year, about half of it into corporate debt, according to financial-data firm Refinitiv.

John Zito, deputy chief investment officer atApollo Global Management, spent his 39th birthday, Saturday, March 21, in his home office. The investment firm had settled into a defensive crouch in February, moving a third of its assets into cash and other ultra-safe holdings. He wanted to go on offense. "You'll never get another chance like this," he told his team, dialed in on a conference call, "to buy great companies at tough prices."

On Monday, the private-equity firm started buying. Over the next two weeks, it spent $800 million a day buying discounted corporate debt and newly issued bonds from Boeing, PetSmart, Airbnb and others.

Central bankers spurred investors on. Global governments have pumped $28 trillion into their economies this year through stimulus spending and financial-market backstops, according to Cornerstone Macro, an economic-research firm. That amounts to nearly one-third of global economic output, roughly what experts estimate was lost in the spring.

United Airlines Holdings Inc. got $5 billion to pay workers under the stimulus bill passed in March, but knew it wasn't enough to compensate for its nearly empty planes. Wall Street filled the gap. The airline sold shares and took on more debt, including $6.8 billion borrowed against its customer-loyalty program, an arrangement quickly followed by rivals.

United and its union struck a deal that saved pilots' jobs -- CEO Scott Kirby wanted to avoid the years of retraining that would be required to rehire them after the pandemic had passed. But thousands of flight attendants, mechanics and others were furloughed in October after government aid ran out.

United has lost more than $5 billion this year and last week warned investors it was burning through more cash than expected. Mr. Kirby resisted calls this summer to add back flights to capture the demand many were sure would return.

"I bet I got 50 emails that said 'build it and they will come,'" he said. "In the real world, if you build it, and they don't come, you go bankrupt."

Moving Faster

Medtronic PLC didn't need money. It needed ventilators. It was Sunday, March 15, and incoming CEO Geoff Martha was riding his Peloton bike in the basement of his suburban Minneapolis home, fielding one call after another -- the White House, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, state governors, the prime minister of Ireland.

"The numbers that they were asking for were orders of magnitude bigger than the entire [ventilator] market," said Mr. Martha, who became CEO of the medical-device maker in April.

So Medtronic began sharing its ventilators designs with anyone willing to build them, and recruited manufacturers of auto parts and spaceships to start making components on their assembly lines.

In April, hospitals in Minneapolis and Chicago asked Medtronic if ventilator settings could be adjusted from outside a patient's room to reduce the risk to hospital staff. Medtronic designed a solution, which was rolled out three weeks later.

"We've never done anything like that," Mr. Martha said.

Medtronic's sales, though hurt by the suspension of elective surgeries like implants of its pacemakers, have rebounded faster than expected. The company reported $7.647 billion in revenue in the quarter ended Oct. 30, just 0.8% shy of the same period last year.

Going Digital

The pandemic accelerated gains in the digital economy. Schools went online. Food delivery surged. More than 86 million households signed up for Walt Disney Co.'s new streaming service in its first year. As a percentage of U.S. retail sales, e-commerce gained nearly five percentage points between Marcy and July, equal to its gains in the previous five years, Federal Reserve data show.

That was welcome news for the SoftBank Vision Fund, which was on its heels early in 2020. It had poured billions of dollars into technology startups with little to show for it and some high-profile duds, like WeWork.

Mr. Misra, the fund's CEO, spent the early days of the pandemic working with companies in his portfolio to slash costs, warning them that they likely wouldn't be able to raise new money for a while. "The market might be shut for 18 months," he told them.

Mr. Misra now says he was too bearish. Two dozen Vision Fund portfolio companies raised fresh cash from private investors this year. Six went public, including DoorDash Inc., the food-delivery company whose IPO documents credited soaring demand during the pandemic for some of its growth. After its shares rose 86% on their first day of trading earlier this month, SoftBank's $680 million investment was worth nearly $12 billion.

"We knew we were in the right place," Mr. Misra said. "Covid made it the right time."

Need to Pivot

Jeff Shell saw his chance. The boss of Comcast Corp.'s NBCUniversal had spent years in a deadlock with movie-theater chains, which had exclusive rights to show new films for months, even as consumers had moved to streaming.

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12-18-20 1214ET