And that goes double for the cutthroat world of business

. But, between the plateaus and the nadirs, the liquidations and the layoffs, there were fissures of light to be found.

A rental giant survived (thrived, even) during a period when travel ground to a halt. A new and promising challenger stepped up to Apple’s smartphone throne. An image-sharing platform even enjoyed an unexpected renaissance. Below, we’ve highlighted the surprise business successes of the past 12 months — and wonder what they might tell us about the year ahead…

Founded in 2011, Zoom rocketed from an arcane name familiar amongst tech wonks to 

. Due to the lockdown measures introduced in multiple countries, the can-you-hear-me videoconferencing app has profited not only from people being forced to socialise virtually, but also those who’ve swapped the office for a makeshift home desk.

As a result, the firm — now widely considered the de-facto communications backbone for companies and organisations — ended the fiscal year with a handsome revenue of $622.7m. That’s up 88% year-over-year, while its number of business customers with ten employees or more grew by almost five times.

The travel sector was one of the hardest-buffeted victims of the public health crisis. Restaurants reinvented themselves as take-outs (or, quite simply, shuttered); turndown services ceased at luxury hotel chains; the turnstiles stopped rotating at major tourist sites.

However, even with the drop in tourist numbers (as well as the company beginning to develop an adverse reputation for having a negative impact on local housing markets) Airbnb went public in December — the biggest US IPO of 2020 — and shares in the rental platform more than doubled on its first day of trading. In an impressive masterstroke, the firm also managed to recruit former Apple veteran Jony Ive.

 The travel industry isn’t completely buried, so you can continue dreaming of renting a cabana in Miami or that midcentury loft in Stockholm you’ve had bookmarked for months.

In the face of Apple’s hegemony and the decline of the global smartphone market, which saw a record-breaking 11% year-on-year decrease in production throughout 2020, Xiaomi has managed to supplant the Cupertino giant to become the third-largest smartphone maker in the world.

The coup comes as a result of Washington’s crackdown on Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies, with global android consumers now leaning towards Xiaomi’s high-quality yet affordable products. In December, months after its Hang Seng Index debut, the Beijing corporation’s market value shot past the $100bn mark, despite only being halfway to that figure when it went public, two years ago.

 Hard to tell, as of now — the industry is still rocky, and the release of 5G phones could swing the pendulum back towards the West Coast.

Amazon and Alibaba may be the untouchable chiefs in the online marketplace, and Latin America’s e-commerce sector is still nascent, but Argentina’s MercadoLibre — it means ‘free market’ in Spanish — has, somewhat unobtrusively, ballooned to become the largest firm in the region.

As electronic payments continuing to soar during lockdowns, the Buenos Aires operation doubled its Nasdaq worth to $84bn during 2020.

 Having seen its share price swell by 928% in the past five years, it might be worth having a flutter on MercadoLibre.

2020 was quite the ride for Elon Musk, the mercurial master of mayhem behind the world’s most important tech programmes. “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” the 49-year-old posted on Twitter, in March. His company, Tesla, violated stay-at-home orders, several times. A series of erratic Tweets in May caused a sell-off of shares in the carmaker, knocking $14bn from its overall value. Moreover, the firm, until recently, was famed for having never turned a profit, and its output doesn’t compare with those of competitors, such as GM.

Yet, having been in the black for a fifth consecutive quarter, Tesla — days before it joined the S&P 500 — saw its shares grow to 700% during the past year. It currently stands as the world’s most valuable car company.

 Electric vehicles are still on course to be the future of the automobile industry.

There are ample reasons to doubt Delivery Hero: it’s never had a profitable year; it made a loss of €660m in 2019; and the likes of Deliveroo and Uber remain the customary names in many households when it comes to on-demand food delivery. Yet, this Berlin-based tech group saw a 109% market value increase during the pandemic. With dining out made illegal in many corners of the globe, takeaway orders have seen demands rise, a period in which the nine-year-old Delivery Hero entered Frankfurt’s Dax 30 index.

Its rivals may have gone through mergers — such as Just Eat and Grubhub — but Delivery Hero has found success in going solo, with operations in almost 50 countries, including Panama and Chile. In an FT interview last August, a portfolio manager at an investment firm which part-owns Delivery Hero said: “focusing on less developed, high-growth markets” is not a bad long-term strategy. It’s currently eyeing up several acquisitions, including a $4bn deal to buy South Korea’s Woowa.

 Is sustainability more favourable than short-term profit? Perhaps.

If you thought that this image-sharing platform had been relegated to irrelevance years ago alongside the indie scene, Kate Nash and Urban Outfitters, then its 2020 performance may have been a little unexpected. A big beneficiary of the disinformation controversies that have plagued rival platforms Twitter and Facebook, Pinterest has become a go-to source of ‘inspo’ for bored minds confined to their homes.

While Facebook focuses more on sharing personal information, Pinterest helps its audience find items related to interiors, weddings and other lifestyle avenues — a magnet for digital advertisers. In its last quarter, sales shot up 60%, while its monthly average users — known as ‘Pinners’ — were up almost 40% YoY.

 A lot of sepia-toned tent weddings with rainbow cakes.

At first glance, 2020 should’ve been a hardscrabble year for fintech company Square, whose main service is to provide in-store point-of-sale payment solutions for small businesses. Along with its core customer base of bijou merchants, Square should’ve also been derailed by Covid — and it was, for a while, as it recorded a net loss in Q1 and Q2.

Yet, with its shift towards e-payments, largely helped by its popular subsidiary Cash App, a mobile payment service which not only offers peer-to-peer money transfers, but additional features such as stock trading services, Square’s stock has exploded by over 250%.

 With an efficient online payments system now in place, the potential return of physical transactions might turbocharge the company’s fortunes even further.

The parent company behind Betfair and Paddy Power has prospered since the beginning of last year, despite the virus ravaging sports events worldwide and its shops closing several times within the past months.

Flutter’s $10bn merger with Stars Group, the Toronto-based gambling giant which owns PokerStars, has aided its online operations, and a rush of betting activity in November, following the resumption of sports, led the company to upgrade its annual earnings expectations by around £100m; it also predicted that its US revenue is likely to pass the $1bn mark.

 With the US Supreme Court having legalised sports betting in 2018, Flutter could solidify itself as the No.1 gambling shop in the States.

When thinking of prosperous and in-demand real estate assets, one would automatically jump to sleek glass boxes in Silicon Valley, high-rises of co-working doom or, at a stretch, empty warehouses ready to be given the Bezos treatment.

However, now that offices and the like have become graveyards, telecom masts have grown in their appeal. For example, American Tower, which comprises over 181,000 communications sites globally, has jumped to become the most valuable listed real estate investment trust in the world.

 American Tower looks set to benefit from 5G rollout. As it leases multi-tenant cell tower sites to communications firms, and with 5G requiring cells to be in closer proximity to one another, this could mean acquisition of further plots and tenants.

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