Maybe we're getting a little philosophical here, but I don't believe inanimate entities can experience "difficulty" or "misfortune".
Would you say that a rock suffers "misfortune" if it topples off a cliff into the sea? Is it "difficult" for a glacier to maintain its integrity in the face of global warming? Is my car unfortunate to have been scratched in a parking lot? (OK, I do believe that last one, but I'm anthropomorphising my car to talk about my own human misfortune)
Definitely philosophical. If we can use statements like “a business had a bad quarter” and “a business had a good quarter” and understand that these mean that the financial statements were negative/positive. It isn’t a stretch to say something like “a business has had 10 straight bad quarters” is a plight considering a business can cease to exist.
If you want to get really pedantic about it, a company is not a "group of people": a company is a particular legal structure for organising a profit-making enterprise. So yes, it is an inanimate entity.
When we say things like "that Lions football team suffered a crushing defeat", we're engaging in metonymy -- referring to the suffering of the members of the team but speaking metaphorically about "the team".
We'll have to agree to disagree here. I don't think whatever arbitrary legal structure there is around a group of people somehow makes the organization not human.
For example, I think it's perfectly normalized to say "that Detroit Lions team suffered a crushing defeat", even though the Detroit Lions are a profit-making enterprise.
Would you say that a rock suffers "misfortune" if it topples off a cliff into the sea? Is it "difficult" for a glacier to maintain its integrity in the face of global warming? Is my car unfortunate to have been scratched in a parking lot? (OK, I do believe that last one, but I'm anthropomorphising my car to talk about my own human misfortune)