In the new issue read about examples of shortening supply chains

Europe, and indeed the world, has become too dependent on the Far East, said HUP president Mihael Furjan recently. Does this mean that companies, having learned from the experiences of the geopolitical and health crisis over the past two years, need to reorganize their supply chains? Certainly, all interlocutors will say, the only question is how. This depends on each case specifically, but generally speaking, crises and the concerning shortage of labor will force European companies to shorten supply chains and relocate production, as well as to adopt the latest automation and digitalization using artificial intelligence. Edis Felić writes about shortening supply chains in the theme of the issue.

We have already absorbed all the generators of inflation growth – from the freezing of the global economy and the global flooding with incredible amounts of all possible banknotes, through broken supply chains and skyrocketing transport prices to wars and, consequently, energy and food crises. Central bank reference rates are rising at an unprecedented pace, yet inflation is only weakly decreasing, showing a remarkable resilience to interest rate measures.

Thus, it is quite expected that the European Central Bank (ECB) has resorted to yet another increase of the three key interest rates, again by 25 basis points. Namely, although inflation is nominally decreasing in the eurozone (from 6.1 percent in May it fell to 5.3 percent in July), it is still multiple times higher than the targeted two percent. Perhaps the measures would more easily hit the target if both central banks and analysts – globally – pointed more accurately to the drivers of inflation. In the new issue, Gordana Gelenčer writes that greed is now the main driver of price increases.

Dejan Kovač (38) is one of the more prominent economists of the younger generation. He earned his doctorate at the prestigious CERGE-EI (Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute) in Prague, worked at Princeton, and is now a researcher at the Institute for Economic Research (IWH) in Halle. All his research is based on data from Croatia. He was seriously involved in football at a young age (the generation of Nike Kranjčar). He is best known to the wider public as a presidential candidate in 2019 and a participant in the most grueling ultramarathons in the world. He started running when he could no longer train seriously for football.

At first, it was a kind of release, and then, he says, it became a means through which he became better. Simplified, if he can be focused for twelve hours on a track that is eighty kilometers long and ensure that he runs it without falling, he can also endure a work pace of more than twelve hours a day, such as at Princeton. We caught Kovač in Zagreb after a vacation in Krk, where he was recovering from injuries after recently completing a 250-kilometer running race through the driest desert in the world, the Chilean Atacama. You can read his interview with Lider’s Goran Litvan in the new issue.

It took almost two years, from when he bought the first 18.8 percent of shares in Đuro Đaković from Nenad Bakić in November 2020, until September 2022, when he finally acquired a majority stake through a capital increase of 31 million euros, for the Czech company DD Acquisition to gain full control over the Slavonski Brod group, and only half a year was enough to show that this acquisition has the potential to return Đaković among Croatia’s industrial leaders. However, there is still a laborious path ahead, which primarily involves completing the restructuring that began last year, but the two-year journey during which the joint efforts of DD Acquisition, the Croatian government, and the European Commission brought about the restructuring program of Đaković was also arduous, which allowed the Czechs to acquire an 81.9 percent ownership stake without taking on the obligation to repay the company’s old debts. With the approval of the European Commission, the government took over Đaković’s old debts. But those are already last year’s snow. The company Đuro Đaković is elaborated in the new issue by Manuela Tašler.

In the new issue of Lider, read also the interview with consultant Zvonimir Mršić, the story about Šmit Electronic, as well as trends in the beverage industry. The new issue also comes with a supplement Summer Trend.