Marko Pipunić currently employs about 1,500 workers.
On Saturday, Marko Pipunić, the owner of Žito from Osijek, participated in Monaco at the 31st EY World Entrepreneur of the Year. Out of 59 entrepreneurs from 49 countries, the winner was Kuradan Murad Al-Katib from Canada, the CEO of AGT Food and Ingredients Inc., one of the world's largest manufacturers of legumes and beans, with a global market share of 23 percent and revenues of 1.4 billion dollars, reports Poslovni.hr and Večernji List on June 13, 2017.
Among the entrepreneurs who were in the competition for the best in the world, Marko Pipunić represented Croatia because in March he won the latest Croatian edition of this global award. He won the title of the Croatian EY Entrepreneur of the Year in the competition of 32 Croatian entrepreneurs from 28 companies.
His Žito group has been operating for 25 years and currently employs about 1,500 employees. “This competition has shown that food production and agribusiness have a future, which was also demonstrated by the victory of the representative of a Canadian company also engaged in agribusiness. In meetings with many entrepreneurs I met in the past few days, I have received their commendations for boldly embarking on the development of new products. Within a short period of just three years, we have made a significant step forward in the production of prosciutto as well, for which many countries and companies need years to accomplish”, said Pipunić.
Pipunić was born in 1961 near Modriča in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He graduated from the Faculty of Agriculture in Osijek, after which he returned to Bosnia where he lived and worked. In 1990, he came back to Osijek and began dealing with seed crops and animal feed. In 1992, he founded Žito as a company trading in crops and reproduction material.
In the beginning, he had just two employees, a capital of 50,000 euros and an annual income of about half a million euros. For years he has been expanding his company by carefully buying bankrupt businesses and silos in neighbouring areas. Today, he is Croatia’s largest pig producer and has built a new production facility in Vuka which produces 70 million eggs annually.
Forbes magazine has named him one of the ten richest people in Croatia. The value of his business empire is estimated at several hundred million euros.
