January the 24th, 2023 - Following a successful 2022, Tankerska plovidba, a transportation company headquartered in Zadar, has begun the process of taking over the Zadar Turisthotel company.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, after taking over the largest individual share of 24.5% of the share capital in the Zadar tourism company in November last year, Tankerska plovidba is now starting the Zadar Turisthotel takeover process.

The company submitted a notice to the Zagreb Stock Exchange about the emergence of the obligation to announce the offer for the takeover of the Zadar Turisthotel company, by concluding an agreement on the transfer of shares with five shareholders of Turisthotel on January the 18th, 2023. Tankerska plovidba thereby acquired another 14.61% of the company's share capital, seeing them reach a total ownership share of 39.34% of the company's capital.

As was stated in the notification, the subject of the takeover offer will be all registered shares of the Target Company, series A, with an individual nominal amount of 580.00 kuna (76.98 euros).

It's worth noting that just one month ago at the open day for shareholders, the Zadar Turisthotel company announced investments of 113 million euros over the next five years, primarily in the renovation and construction of new accommodation facilities and other entertainment facilities.

The new investment cycle of the Zadar Turisthotel company will include the additional improvement and the raising of the quality of their existing facilities, new catering, hospitality and entertainment facilities, the complete revamping of the main street within the resort itself, the reconstruction of the remaining apartments from 3 to 4 stars, the construction and introduction of new facilities and content, and last but by no means least - the Aenona Park project, which includes a new campsite, hotel, sport and entertainment facilities in the northern part of the settlement in Zaton.

In the City of Zadar, there are also plans to build a new hotel located within the city's very heart on the site of the former Pobjeda (Victory) cinema, and to convert the Boutique Hostel Forum into another new hotel. According to those plans, Turisthotel will annually invest approximately 22 million euros into these and other new projects.

For more, make sure to check out our dedicated business section.

November the 8th, 2022 - The Zadar agency Telum has created a new and innovative tool which will help us rethink our personal data protection as things are set to change significantly with third party cookies.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Josipa Ban writes, privacy protection, which is most obviously reflected in the abolition or blocking of third-party cookies, has caused tectonic changes in digital advertising, and as such in ever-present digital media.

Huge changes are happening in this field because over more recent years, digital advertising has become "dependent" on third-party cookies. How could it not rely on it, when you take into account the fact that cookies are what lead advertisers to exactly where they need to be and who they need to be shown to by said individual's preferences?

In addition to targeted ads, cookies also enable advertisers to measure their own campaign results, user profiling and optimisation, all with the aim of achieving the best possible marketing results. However, third party cookies are increasingly being blocked by users and web browsers themselves due to privacy protection issues.

For example, the Safari browser has already discontinued them, and the consequences of such practices can be seen in the Zadar agency Telum, which is a marketing agency that has been involved in the creation, management and optimisation of Internet marketing campaigns for fourteen years now. The most important goal of marketing is performance, i.e. earnings and the growth of the client.

"When it comes to measuring the success of campaigns, we're already noticing that 50 percent of solutions that rely on third party cookies become invisible precisely because of their rejection," explained Mario Ivic, the founder and director of the Zadar agency Telum.

The situation will become even more difficult when one of the leading web browsers, Google's very own wildly popular Chrome, also chooses to block their use, which has already been announced for the third quarter of 2024. The consequences of such a move will be felt not only by advertisers but also by digital media.

"Everything starts with the advertiser themselves. They should adapt the measurement of campaign results to the increasingly frequent blocking of third party cookies. If they don't, they'll lose a lot of information, and this affects the quality of data optimisation. That being said, a much bigger problem is that with weaker targeting and user segmentation capabilities, campaigns become less efficient, and therefore less well paid. This inevitably spills over to publishers, that is, digital media, who have to reckon with a smaller number of advertisers and lower prices," explained Ivic.

Advertisers and digital media must therefore adapt to these new market conditions, and the solution, says Ivic, who is also the co-owner of Midas Network, a platform for native advertising, is in the preparation of technology for "first party" data, which enables user profiling on only one single domain.

"This somewhat reduces the quality of the data, but there are solutions that minimise this effect. These are CDP (Customer Data Platform) or DMP (Data Management Platform) solutions that enable user segmentation. By standardising these segments, over time, you can achieve a situation in which advertising becomes almost as good as it was with third party cookies,'' Ivic pointed out, and adding that some publishers are already using these solutions, while others haven't even started preparing for this yet.

The Zadar agency Telum, a marketing agency that stands out of the crowd for its own development of digital tools that help clients make their campaigns more successful, is also working on a solution to this problem, and that saw it placed on Deloitte's ranking of the fastest growing technology companies in Central Europe for three years in a row (from 2016 to 2018).

However, Ivic doesn't want to reveal much at all until the product is fully developed, so he just briefly pointed out that the software should be on the market in about three to four months, and its specialty will be that it will be the first solution adapted to the specifics of the Croatian market and at the same time be the only Croatian solution of that category for digital advertising using first party data.

Telum's brand new digital tool should be an additional tailwind for the company that has carried out more than three thousand campaigns to date, which achieved 18 percent growth in revenue in 2021, and which should be even higher in 2022. It should help advertisers and digital media minimise the negative effects of privacy protection policies and cookie blocking.

For more on Croatian companies, make sure to check out our dedicated business section.

September the 20th, 2022 - The Zadar company Turisthotel is set to make some considerable investments, expand, and further develop the quality of what they already offer.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Crnjak writes, the Zadar company Turisthotel recently celebrated 40 years of the operation of the popular Zaton Holiday Resort, all while announcing new investments in the hotel business set to come.

Around 6,000 guests are currently staying at the aforementioned resort, and the largest percentage of them come from Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Austria, all of whom are responsible for this year's record tourism results after a horrendous two years dominated by a global public health crisis.

The next five years

"Turisthotel is now entering a new investment cycle, which is more oriented towards investing in the additional improvement of the quality of the existing infrastructure, as well as the expansion, upgrading and modernisation of our existing facilities. These investments, which will be realised in different phases over the next five years, have been made possible thanks to the stable and continuous growth of the business.

I believe that this is a key imperative for the company's further development, as well as in terms of additional positioning on the market, both for the resort itself, as well as for Nin, the City of Zadar and the entire wider Zadar region as an attractive and desirable tourist destination," said the president of Turisthotel's Management Board, Meri Matesic Sicic.

In the coming period, the reconstruction of 159 apartments ranging from 3 to 4 stars will begin in the Zaton Holiday Resort, the construction and the introduction of new hospitality and entertainment facilities, as well as the complete renovation of the main street of the resort is planned.

As Matesic Sicic revealed, the plan is to build a city hotel located within the centre of Zadar itself, in the building which once housed the former Pobjeda (Victory) cinema, and to convert Boutique Hostel Forum into a hotel.

In addition to all of the above, the plans also include the construction and arrangement of a multi-purpose office space that would include catering and hospitality facilities as part of the Visnjik Sports Centre.

For more, make sure to check out our dedicated business section.

Three Croatian engineers have launched a company called HSTec, which currently employs ninety workers and has an impressive turnover of 70 million kuna.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes on the 21st of August, 2019, on the "ruins" of Zadar's former SAS, a formerly globally renowned speciality machine tool factory, a brand new Croatian company under the name of HSTec was created, which has taken over some of their former glory and is now recognised worldwide for its sophisticated engines and robotics.

Namely, 22 years ago in one former SAS facility in Zadar, three Croatian engineers - Željko Goja, Mladen Šarlija and Frane Marasović, started the HSTec (High Speed ​​Technique) company, and perfected the production of high-speed motors for machine tools that handle parts in the automotive industry.

As was explained by Mladen Šarlija, the director and CEO of the aforementioned company, today, HSTec is at the top in terms of the world's production of high-speed motor spindles for the tool industry and robotics for various applications and industries, and is known for being a very stable and export-oriented company. This Croatian company exports as much as 85 percent of its products and services and is present on demanding markets across the European Union, as well as across the Arlantic ocean in the USA.

The major buyers of HSTec's automotive products come from the glass, foundry and food industries.

"Over the last few years, we've been implementing a number of projects, ranging from the construction of our production and business premises, to new product development projects with a total value of approximately 14 million kuna. Those projects, which are co-funded by EU funds, there has been employment growth and the raising of the company's income through sales, and through the expansion of production facilities and the improvement of working conditions, all the way to strengthening development capacities and, consequently, increasing the company's reputation,'' explained Šarlija.

The Croatian Agency for Small Business, Innovation and Investment (HAMAG-BICRO) has certainly proven to be one of the major sources of EU fund withdrawal, for which several projects have been applied by HSTec for open calls and programs, thus raising investments of 18.5 million kuna in total.

Through the Internationalisation of SME Businesses, Capacity Building and Investment in Equipment, Commercialization of Entrepreneurship Innovation and PoC7 programs, HAMAG-BICRO have awarded this Croatian company almost 6 million kuna in grants.

These investments have enabled them to grow their business, and as a result of increasing orders and establishing new partnerships, HSTec has increased employment, and by 2022, they plan to employ fourteen new employees in addition to the existing ninety. The company had revenues of 70 million kuna and a profit of 9.2 million kuna last year.

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