Funeral Companies are Losing Millions Because Not Enough People are Dying

The winter of 2018 was, overall, a pretty good one. That’s if you use the metric of how many people kicked the bucket. A combination of mild weather and an effective flu vaccine meant there were several thousand less fatalities this winter than last year, according to Fairfax. And most people would agree that’s a good thing.

Most people, but not all people. There are those who are slightly less stoked about the amount of Australian citizens who clung to the mortal coil this year. Spare a thought for the good folk of the nation’s funeral companies, for example, whose revenue model has been veritably torpedoed by the fact that their yearly clientele has more or less dissipated.

Companies like InvoCare, one of Australia’s largest funeral groups, rely on the seasonal winter purge for their bread and butter. They’re in the business of death, after all. And this year, not enough people died.

InvoCare—which operates 250 funeral homes and crematoriums around Australia, including brands such as White Lady Funerals, Simplicity Funerals and Tobin Brothers—revealed this week that the number of funeral cases it handled over the first nine months of 2018 was 2,000 less than at the same time last year. As a result, they’ve suffered a $17 million blow to their yearly revenues. On Monday, the company’s shares slid a further 3.6 percent, making for a 21 percent decrease since mid-August.

Pathology companies Sonic Healthcare and Primary Healthcare are also feeling the pinch, as the amount of confirmed positive flu cases dropped by around 90 percent this year. The good health of Australians is having an impact on the pathology industry as a whole, as stockbroking house Credit Suisse recently concluded that "The benign flu season is consistent throughout all of Australia.”

Still, while these business men and women sweat over the amount of money they stand to net in 2018, it’s worth remembering that what we’re talking about here is an overwhelmingly benign flu season. Using InvoCare as a temperature check, it seems as though several thousand less people died this winter than last winter—largely due to the efficacy of a new flu vaccine. And that’s pretty great.