September the 3rd, 2022 - Fiscalised invoices, bills and receipts issued across Croatia during the month of August are very encouraging, exceeding August 2021's amount by a very impressive 5.1 billion kuna more.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Jadranka Dozan writes, while various statistical indicators of Croatian economic activity typically arrive with a greater or lesser time lag depending on the sector we're talking about, the first figures on the movement of consumption measured by fiscalised traffic, which really means physical indicators of the tourist season, are publicly available practically immediately.
That means that even though we've only just entered the month of September, we can see that all taxpayers (from all activities listed within that system) in August issued receipts worth 31.6 billion kuna, which, when compared to the same month last year, is a figure higher by almost a fifth (19.3%) that is, by 5.1 billion more kuna. During the summer months, there is an increased focus primarily on tourism, catering and hospitality activities, as well as those heavily influenced the tourist season, from trade to transportation.
Stronger growth in the hospitality industry
Enterprises working in the provision of accommodation, catering and hospitality reported 8.4 billion kuna in fiscalised turnover in August 2022. Compared to last August, this is 1.6 billion kuna or 16 percent more. Slightly more than half of last month's turnover refers to accommodation (4.3 billion), but year-on-year comparisons show that stronger growth was recorded in the hospitality sector.
Cafes, restaurants, bars and other companies operating within the segment of food and beverage preparation/service during the month of August of this year issued less than 4.1 billion kuna's worth of receipts, which is almost 30 percent or 930 million kuna more than last year, while the aforementioned turnover in accommodation represents an increase of 18 percent or about 660 million kuna.
To a large extent, the growth percentages, of course, reflect increased prices caused by ongoing inflation. This naturally means that companies have had to deal with unusually high operating costs of their own to remain above water, but that's another story for another time.
Be that as it may, the cumulative data shows significantly higher growth rates of fiscalised traffic in the tourism, hospitality and catering sector. In terms of accommodation, the 8-month turnover reached 12.1 billion kuna, thus exceeding last year's 8 billion kuna by a very significant 51 percent. At the same time, almost 16.1 billion kuna was reported in the hospitality industry since the beginning of the year, which is as much as 70 percent more than last year's 9.5 billion kuna, which can partly be attributed to the lower seasonality of that segment and the fact that in the first part of last year, the impact of epidemiological restrictions was still considerable.
Among the activities that rely quite heavily on tourism during the summer months is the transportation and storage category.
Croatian companies operating within that branch reported almost 540 million kuna in fiscalised turnover in August 2022, which is 36 percent more than last August. A significantly larger 80 percent of the increase in the value of issued bills and receipts was also recorded through the fiscalisation system in Administrative and auxiliary service activities (435 versus 242 million kuna).
In the retail trade (excluding that of motor vehicles), bills worth a total of 12.7 billion kuna were issued last month, which is about one hundred million more than in July and 1.55 billion kuna or almost 14 percent more than in August 2021. At the same time, more than half of that turnover refers to supermarkets and hypermarkets, i.e. non-specialised stores mainly selling food, drinks, tobacco and household products, where the increase in August's turnover stood at a slightly higher 17 percent (6.9 against 5.9 billion kuna recorded last August).
For more, make sure to check out our dedicated business section.
