Ah! Remember Covid? The whole thing with masks, gloves, and snot swap. It literally seems it’s been ages, It came and went in a flash!
Let’s be honest, to “some” it was a disaster while to some others was their honey pot. A lot of people hated it, I read horror stories of people becoming different people while being trapped in their living rooms.
But on the other hand, Covid has brought many blessings, seriously! Let’s count them: the normalization of Netflix binge, the ‘It’s ok to sleep all day’, resurrected many industries from the dead or at least blowing a massive bubble inside it some of biggest retro names like AMC, GameStop, and bringing some unknown names to the front pages such as the infamous SBF (who’s soon to be acquitted), to name a few.
Crypto, the whole thing was literally in hibernation since 2009 until people realized that someone can actually sit at home, behind computer screen with a bag of Doritos, and make money by building their own micro economy and sell their own currency.
Zuck’s Metaverse which it seems officially dead for the foreseeable future.
Even Uber lost of almost 85% of its core business just to be saved by the food delivery service (1)
and most importantly which this piece is all about:
Pet adoption. Yes, believe me it is a thing.
250%.
That’s the number.
Both dog and cat adoptions saw a surge of up to 250% from during the early stages of the pandemic, in April and May 2020, the global Relative Search Volume (RSV) for pet, dog, and cat adoption categories peaked, surpassing the figures from the same period in 2019 by a significant margin, according to a 5-year comparison.
United Arab Emirates in the 27th place ranked after Singapore (28), Canada (46), Australia (52), and the highest United States (2).
Based on data from Redseer Consulting, the pet care market in MENA experienced a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13% between 2021 and 2022, reaching an impressive SOM of $800 million in 2022 of a total of $5.5B of SAM in MENAT (3) and these numbers will only keep going up, why? Yes, Covid is the number one trigger, also largely due to factors such as rising disposable incomes, changing lifestyles, and increasing awareness of the benefits of pet ownership.
Pet world is just a parallel world to ours, needs almost everything except divorce lawyers.
On a personal level, we have adopted a cat during Covid, we named her July, we have also lost a cat, too, Arya.
So yeah, thank you Covid, so much, but please don’t show up again.