The Lider-Bisnode list of the 500 best Croatian companies, which we publish alongside this week’s issue of Lider, and present today at the Day of Big Plans, is one of the best indicators of business trends. This year’s list at first glance reflects the great success of the best companies in 2016 – their newly created value increased by almost 20 percent, productivity rose an impressive 18 percent, and exports grew by 17 percent… However, the lessons of the past decade – during which we have published this list – show another side of the coin. The aggregate results clearly reflect the consequences of a long-standing recession. And only now are the best companies on the path to achieving results prior to the recession.
Namely, the newly created value (the sum of gross wages and gross profits) has only this year, at 9.17 billion euros, reached the result from 2008. The achieved profit is only 1.8 billion euros, which is about 30 percent less than that paid out in 2009, when entrepreneurs rushed to distribute profits at the last moment. Revenue is also 8.5 percent lower than in the record year of 2007, which is a shortfall of 3.5 billion euros! The domestic market has dramatically shrunk during the recession, which is why, out of necessity, exports have significantly increased – by more than 14 percent compared to 2007, and even 66 percent compared to 2009.
The most dramatic aspect of the past decade has been reflected in the ’employment’ policy. Namely, the top 500 companies lost as many as 23,426 jobs from 2007 to 2016. For comparison, Konzum employs the largest number of people in Croatia – in 2015… (there are no indicators yet for 2016), so this exodus is equivalent to the disappearance of two Konzums!?
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One of the consequences of such a strategy is last year’s explosion of temporary employment agencies, to which we have dedicated a special, new sector in this list. And as they operate better and better, it means that companies are increasingly engaging them to avoid having too many people in ‘cold operation’. It can be expected that this model will gain more and more momentum. This is a good recipe that entrepreneurs are applying for productivity growth. However, neither entrepreneurs nor the state have found a recipe to stop emigration.
