Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic is a historic global disaster that had a global impact on human health and economic well-being. COVID-19 had a negative impact on all types of small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) around the world. As a result, South African enterprises were forced to react quickly to avoid losing their businesses by shifting to e-commerce. The study presents a comparison of the financial impact of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions on Gauteng-based SMMEs in the supermarket, restaurant and tourism industries using a South-African bank’s point-of-sale (POS) de-identified data. The study found that the tourism industry was the most adversely financially impacted, followed by the restaurant industry and that the supermarket industry was the least negatively financially impacted based on turnover sales transacted through POS devices during the two periods of April to May 2020 and 2021. The monthly turnover data was based on the participating South African bank's SMME clients who had active POS devices. The study's financial data compared the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown restrictions on SMMEs during both April to May 2020 and 2021. During the second period all three industries saw an increase in turnover, indicating that SMMEs were determined to implement the necessary technological innovations to recover from the results of the unexpected pandemic. According to the study, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown periods Gauteng-based SMMEs relied heavily on the benefits of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), such as POS devices, for customer payments.