September the 2nd, 2021 - The Golden Key Awards are upon us, and with the horrendous pandemic dominated year of 2020 quite comfortably behind us, we can look at how Croatian companies performed under the most dire of economic circumstances. These are the best Croatian exporters of 2020.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, Koncar - Distributive and special transformers/Distributivni i specijalni transformatori was named the best of the large Croatian exporters for last year. The Golden Key Award, which is being awarded for the fourteenth time in a row, was presented to them at the sixteenth annual convention of the Croatian Exporters' Association which was held in Zagreb on Wednesday.
In the category of medium-sized Croatian exporters, the winner was the astonishing Infobip from the Istrian town of Vodnjan, while the software company Axilis, which develops online betting platforms, was declared the laureate among micro and small companies.
''Croatian exporters are a shining example of the Croatian economy, but they are forced to work in much worse conditions than official statistics show and we must be concerned about that,'' said Darinko Bago, the president of the Croatian Exporters' Association at the Convention of this interest group.
"As this is a turning point, a year full of crisis, 2020 was problematic for most companies, and all comparisons of business and exports are made with pre-pandemic 2019. Back in 2019, there was a decline in exports compared to the year before. We recorded a drop in trade by 11 percent and services by 20 percent. The reason for this is the bipolar world, which, in addition to having a political plan, also has great implications for the economy. Now, the situation with Afghanistan has reignited and we're yet to see how it will affect the global economy," Bago warned.
Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development, Tomislav Coric, said that for small and open economies, such as that boasted by the Republic of Croatia, exports are a prerequisite for development and basic survival.
"Croatian GDP has been growing for years, and lately, exports have been one of the main factors in economic growth and economic recovery. Exports even recorded very good results in 2020, because although numbers did fall, they fell much less than the general GDP did. This year alone, we're recording a large recovery in exports with numbers like 60 billion kuna, which is 11 billion kuna more than in the pre-crisis 2019 ", said Coric, added that we must be careful in this analysis of the growth of the value of exports, because part of it is related to global inflation.
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