As Poslovni Dnevnik/Jadranka Dozan writes, at last week’s general meeting, the Adris Group voted on a proposal for the payment of dividends, which are somewhat more generous than they were last year. During the first week of July, shareholders will receive a payment of 15.50 kuna per share (compared to last year’s 12.5 kuna per share and no dividends to speak of whatsoever the year before that), which means that around 254 million kuna will be directed to dividends from accumulated retained earnings from previous years.
In his concluding comment on the business results of the Adris Group and its main components (tourism, insurance and healthy food), CEO Marko Remenar said that the company is operationally and financially ready to take further business steps and engage in the continuation of “active dividend policy”.
An ambitious set of plans
In addition to a “well-diversified portfolio of jobs”, Remenar also underlined the high investment potential and the ambitious list of the company’s prepared investments. For the period until 2024 (including this year), their investment plans are worth an enormous 3.2 billion kuna, and four-fifths of those investments, or about 2.5 billion kuna, relate to the tourism part of the portfolio, which in the case of the Adris Group primarily means the development of the luxury segment tourism.
This year and over the next two years, on average, more than 800 million kuna will be invested in this sector alone, and as the Adris Group’s spokesman Predrag Grubic noted, most of that refers to the renovation of some Zagreb hotels (along with Panorama, which is already in the process of renovation, the other one will be Westin) as well as Hotel Marjan in Split, and they’ll also continue to invest in camps and resorts. The three-year projections for the insurance sector envisage investments worth 410 million kuna, and in that sense, Croatia osiguranje’s focus is being placed primarily on investments in digitalisation.
IT in general accounts for a significant share of the Adris Group’s investments, and their current plan to invest around half a billion kuna in business digitalisation by 2025 speaks in favour of this. In terms of the sectors themselves, the three-year plan includes 230 million kuna of investments in the business area of healthy food, ie Cromaris. In the aforementioned investment cycle of 3.2 billion kuna, “possible acquisitions aren’t included”, Grubic explained.
According to the parliamentary presentation of the Adris Group’s results and business activities, over the past two years, despite the uncertainties caused by the coronavirus pandemic, almost 840 million kuna of capital investments were made. Compared to the pre-crisis year of 2019, investment activities continued at a solid pace (450 million in 2020 and 390 million last year), and in the coming period it should be further accelerated. Given that the company is still actually indebted in a low sense, the investment potential is unquestionable. Thanks to a strong recovery in operating profit, which again exceeded an impressive 1 billion kuna last year, the Adris Group entered this year with a debt ratio (net debt to EBITDA) of a mere 0.8.
The management boards of Adris’ companies gave their shareholders a brief overview of the main features of how business went during the first four months of this year, and the presented data indicates further improvements in terms of results. As such, Croatia osiguranje (insurance) recorded slightly faster sales growth compared to 5.6 percent growth in the total market, which further strengthened its share here on the domestic market. In the first four months of 2022, the gross written premium of CO was higher by seven percent than it was last year, while net profit was higher by nine percent. In the tourism segment, the first third of this year was marked by strong growth in both sales revenues and physical indicators.
Compared to 82 million kuna in sales revenue back during the first four months of last year, by the end of April this year, they reached a huge 188 million kuna, with the number of occupied units being 2.5 times higher. The state of bookings and reservations at the beginning of June has significantly improved, with Istrian facilities, but also those down in Dubrovnik, exceeding the figures from the pre-pandemic, record year of 2019.
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