With an investment of 75 million kuna, Konzum has opened the largest format store in its offering – Super Konzum in Karlovac.
At a ceremonial event attended by numerous guests, it was opened by the Mayor of Karlovac, Damir Jelić, and the President of Konzum’s Management Board, Darko Knez.
As Knez emphasized, the Karlovac Super Konzum is the largest retail investment by Konzum this year, and it will directly employ around 200 people, both within Konzum and in the business premises of Konzum’s business partners – tenants. The new shopping center spans approximately nine thousand square meters of gross area, of which four thousand square meters pertains to the sales area of Konzum itself.
Although completed at the end of 2012, Super Konzum is actually an investment by Konzum that has been ongoing for several years and has faced a series of difficulties that needed to be resolved – from property-legal issues to infrastructural ones. The newly opened Super Konzum was built on the site of the former Velebit knitwear and padding factory, which was sold to Konzum for 19.16 million kuna in mid-2008 after bankruptcy and years of decline and unsuccessful attempts to resolve several decades of unresolved property-legal issues.
The Mayor Jelić himself mentioned how many problems there were, stating in his speech today that the City itself was four times on the verge of abandoning the entire plan and cooperation, which ultimately bore fruit in the form of the construction of Super Konzum. Moreover, Jelić expressed his happiness that Velebit no longer exists at that location and that today a ‘magnificent Konzum’ has been built there. Whether it is truly better that 209 production jobs, which Velebit had when it went bankrupt in 2002, were lost, while around 200 retail jobs were created at a time of drastically reduced purchasing power and significant competition from retail chains, will be determined by economic indicators and market strength.
