Međimurje-plin: A Good Company That Does Not ‘Navigate Through Backstage Competitive Sabotage’

When you find a company today that has a greater supply of labor than demand, that is news. According to the director of Čakovec’s Međimurje-plin Nenad Hranilović, this is precisely the case with this company, which has recently been in the spotlight more due to taking over work from the City Gas Company Zagreb (GPZ) than because it seems to be a well-organized entity.

Currently, Međimurje-plin has 86 employees. Hranilović states that despite the outflow of specialists, the market offers highly educated personnel, as well as people with secondary education, of all professions, especially lawyers, IT specialists, and economists.

– To date, given the successful business operations, we have had all the necessary staff, from technical professions, such as gas fitters, to technicians, economists… The supply of personnel is greater than demand, and significantly so – emphasizes the head of the company.

Very Competitive Salary

This is also important for today’s time, we would say. The number of employees (86) has significantly increased compared to previous years when it changed slightly. For example, last year there were 68, the same as the year before, and slightly fewer employees were recorded from 2019 to 2021. Average monthly salaries and compensations were significantly higher in all five years of observation (2019 – 2023) compared to the aggregate values of the industry, ranging from 1314 euros in 2019 (in the industry 1171 euros) to last year’s 1826 euros (in the industry 1478 euros), which is an increase of 18.9 percent compared to 2022. Thus, the difference in average salaries between Međimurje-plin and the entire industry has been growing in recent years, and last year it was over 400 euros, which is indeed not insignificant.

This is likely the reason for the company’s attractiveness to the workforce. The labor supply allows it to better select higher quality personnel, which is a plus for business. It is at the top of the industry, just behind PPD, GPZ, and HEP-plin, and the total market value last year was 3.94 billion euros. For illustration, PPD holds 88.4 percent of that (revenue of 3.48 billion euros), but excluding Pavle Vujnovac’s company, it is an industry whose average annual revenue growth from 2019 to 2023 was 13.6 percent, while Međimurje-plin’s was 15.9 percent.

Hranilović could not disclose the business results for the first nine months of this year, but he claims that positive business operations have continued. The planned revenue from the Zagreb area is also not negligible.

– According to internal monitoring, the business is positive, and we expect that to continue until the end of the year. Regarding the Zagreb area, given that the situation in the distribution area of the City Gas Company Zagreb changes daily, the planned annual revenue is 41.8 million euros – emphasizes Hranilović.

This means that in these three months, since the company took over public gas supply for the Zagreb area, it could generate an additional ten million euros.

GPZ was defeated in the tender for the public supplier of consumers in the areas of Zagreb, Velika Gorica, and Zaprešić, but what happened afterward did not sit well with the Međimurje people. Hranilović highlights Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomašević, whose statements, however, he does not want to comment on ‘regardless of the content’.

– A lot of derogatory remarks have been made about the trading company Međimurje-plin without first looking into one’s own backyard, as we would say. When it comes to our company, our strength lies in our personnel, the people who work and want to work, as well as our customers, and the more dynamic the market is, the stronger and greater our strengths and opportunities are. Our weakness is that we do not navigate through backstage competitive sabotage – notes Hranilović.

Tomašević’s Success

We managed to talk to several other employees of Međimurje-plin, who expressed even resentment over the campaign launched by Mayor Tomašević. It was indeed quite fierce to keep GPZ’s existing consumers in the Zagreb area and, according to the claims of Zagreb’s city fathers, they managed to retain about 170 thousand consumers, or the previous 75 percent. Here, it is questionable that politics intervened in attracting consumers, placing emphasis on local patriotism rather than the quality of the offer, although Tomašević has legitimacy as a representative of the owner of GPZ. However, according to Forbes’ writing from two weeks ago, Hranilović claimed ‘that someone was filling out requests for the transition to GPZ’s market service instead of the citizens themselves.’ However, he did not say such a thing to Lider, or perhaps he did not want to, but the fact that only a quarter of consumers from the Zagreb area accepted the offer from Međimurje-plin can be considered a success of the political campaign of the Zagreb mayor.

GPZ offered a ten euro cent lower price for gas to attract consumers, while Međimurje-plin’s response was a twenty euro cent lower offer. However, it seems that a new offer from Čakovec is forthcoming.

– For the entire area of Croatia, we are considering not a 20 but a 50 euro cent cheaper gas than the public service. The price of gas is otherwise not easy to predict since it is determined by the market, or at least it should be, but for now, it is stable – says Hranilović….

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