ZAGREB, October 21, 2019 – Croatia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry generates revenue growth every year, and as an industry of the future it can set in motion serious changes, a National Trade Association (NTA) summit of DigitalEurope, the organisation that represents the digital technology industry, was told in Zagreb on Monday.
The summit, hosted by the Croatian Chamber of Commerce (HGK), is taking place on Monday and Tuesday and has brought together the chief executives of its member organisations. Zagreb was chosen because Croatia assumes the six-month rotating European Union presidency on January 1 and because the HGK is a member of DigitalEurope.
“The purpose of the meeting is to emphasise the impact of digital transformation on economic development and social prosperity. The Croatian ICT industry is facing a lot of challenges because no other sector in the country attracts so many investments and has such a multiplier effect on all other branches of the economy. As an industry of the future it also has a chance to set in motion serious changes in the country,” said the head of the HGK Industry Division, Tajana Kesić Šapić.
She presented the Digital Chamber project, which aims to increase access to services through digitisation of the HGK’s business.
The meeting was also presented with data from the InfoTrend company according to which the ICT industry in Croatia in 2018 performed much better than the overall economy.
In 2018 Croatia’s ICT industry generated 36.9 billion kuna in total revenue, an increase of 3.1 billion kuna or 9.4 percent compared with 2017. Of this amount, 1.8 billion kuna (+7%) was generated in Croatia and 1.3 billion kuna (+19%) abroad. The exports were mostly driven by micro-businesses, i.e. programmers either in domestic or in foreign ownership.
The Director-General of DigitalEurope, Cecilia Bonefeld-Dahl, said that meetings like this were an opportunity to discuss important strategies for digitisation that would later be included in European legislation.
She said that many leading corporations still mostly followed debates concerning national legislation and that it was very important for them to be aware of what was happening in Brussels because it was there that policies were made and later incorporated into national legislation.
More news on the IT industry can be found in the Business section.
