[500 best] Companies from the Lider list are developing 50 percent faster than the rest of the economy after the pandemic

With this week’s Lider, we offer you a bilingual Croatian-English publication ‘500 largest’ in which we present the best companies in Croatia.

They achieved record business results for the second consecutive year in 2022. In the two years following the pandemic, their newly created value (NSV) increased by as much as 48.1 percent. This is how much the amount of money that the 1000 best companies poured into state and personal consumption through taxes and contributions, net salaries, and net profit, as well as investments, increased. At the same time, all entrepreneurs in Croatia also raised NSV by an impressive 30.2 percent.

However, the best have recovered significantly faster from record sick days of their employees, lockdowns, closed borders, and disrupted supply chains, and they have fared better than the rest of the economy even after the Russian aggression on Ukraine and the energy crisis. The best also saw faster growth in revenues (61.7 percent compared to 47.4 percent), exports (121 percent compared to 86.5 percent), and even the number of employees (15.1 percent compared to 5.1 percent).

However, it should be noted that the best were extremely rigorous regarding layoffs in the pandemic year of 2020, when they reduced the number of employees by a full 14 percent (which was almost 50 thousand fewer jobs!). At the same time, other entrepreneurs recorded an increase of about 28,000 employees. There is logic in this. The best companies used state wage subsidies, which were conditioned on job preservation, to a lesser extent than other entrepreneurs.

Thus, they actually relatively elegantly solved the then surplus of employees, most of whom they returned to work in 2021 (41,374) and in 2022 (3,603), but last year they still had 3,870 fewer employees than in the record year of 2019. It can be speculated whether the best companies would have hired more if they could find adequate labor (as this is an increasingly alarming problem in Croatia), or whether they turned to digitalization and robotization faster than the rest of the economy, and in this context, the use of artificial intelligence is also current this year.

Lider, in collaboration with Dun&Bradstreet, has been preparing a publication dedicated to the largest creators of added value for 16 years, we only renamed that category to newly created value, to avoid conceptual confusion due to value-added tax (VAT). During that period, the 1000 best reported 760 billion euros in revenue, which is as much as 51 percent of the total economy’s revenue, and even 54 percent of exports (146 billion euros), with less than 300,000 employees (on average), which is only 36 percent of the total average workforce. These data best confirm what kind of elite we are dealing with and how relevant this sample is for excellence in Croatian business.

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