In the absence of publicly available data on the capacities of the milling industry in Croatia, the approval from AZTN for Granolio to acquire the milling business of Osijek’s Žito has at least revealed that Granolio does not have a dominant share in flour production and will not have one even after adding two more mills to its operations.
However, Granolio has already been the largest flour producer in Croatia, with its mills Farina and Kopanica having a total daily production capacity of 540 tons, which hypothetically, assuming they produce every day of the year, would mean that they could yield nearly 200 thousand tons of flour annually. With the mills in Đakovo and Županja that it is acquiring from Žito, whose capacities are unknown to us, it is likely approaching flour production at the level of Croatia’s annual needs, which are around 300 thousand tons.
If that assumption is not entirely accurate, we believe we can accurately guess what motivated Hrvoje Filipović, the majority owner and CEO of Granolio, to purchase two more mills – the ownership merger of his two largest competitors in flour production. By recently entering the ownership structure of Čakovečki mlinovi, the Sisak company Mlin i pekare has added to its mill, with a production capacity of 105 thousand tons per year, the milling facilities in Čakovec and Donji Kraljevac, which have a total capacity of 80 thousand tons. In other words, the Plodinec family, the majority owner of Mlin i pekare, with a capacity of 185 thousand tons, is breathing down Granolio’s neck.
