As Marija Brnic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes, state guarantees for shipbuilding are increasingly rare items on the table at government sessions, and the first one this year was approved for Danko Koncar’s Trogir shipyard.
After restructuring with state support and then new settlement processes through pre-bankruptcy procedures, shipbuilding on the Trogir peninsula now takes place through the company Brodotrogir Cruise, but in a significantly reduced scope and within an even more significantly altered market niche.
The former trend of the construction of large chemical tankers, which dominated the entire Trogir area, has been replaced by the construction of small cruisers, yachts and workboats for fishing. This is how the new guarantee of the Ministry of Finance was issued for the second phase of the started construction, a fishing boat for Norwegian clients.
The state has already followed Brodotrogir’s cooperation with the Norwegian Moen Marina with a guarantee issued back at the end of 2021, for one vessel (Nov. 369) and the construction of the hull for the other (Nov. 370), and these two contracted constructions have now been completed, and the equipment guarantee has been approved for the second ship (Nov. 370), for which the hull was built back during the first phase.
For the completion of construction, the Croatian Government approved a guarantee of four million euros, which is 80 percent of the entire value of the contracted work. The condition for the implementation of this state guarantee is, among other things, the return of the guarantee for the loan from HBOR, which was previously issued to Brodotrogir for the first phase of that project, more specifically for the construction of the hull, which amounted to 0.5 million euros.
Brodotrogir, unlike the much larger shipyards located in Split, Rijeka and Pula, is undergoing a new phase of recovery more quickly and quietly, and that, at least according to Brodotrogir Cruise Board member Mateo Tramontana, exclusively thanks to its own resources.
“Our companies went through a pre-bankruptcy settlement, and everything coincided with the coronavirus pandemic that hit our business hard. The main problem was that we lost jobs, but we had no loans and obligations, we sold a marina and two tankers, and made the decision to preserve the backbone of the shipyard and, in simple terms, to cover ourselves for as long as we could,” explained Tramontana.
The lack of jobs is also visible in the financial results for the pandemic-dominated year of 2021, in which the shipyard experienced a large drop in revenue, which fell to a mere 17 million kuna, and a serious loss of 10.6 million kuna was also recorded.
However, Tramontana noted that at the end of that year alone, their business situation began to improve, and in the last year, according to him, twice as much income was achieved and the year ended with a profit of around two million kuna. Brodotrogir’s manager is convinced that 2023 will be a much more successful business year.
In the order book, Brodotrogir Cruise already has five service ships scheduled for the Norwegians, one yacht for a Croatian company whose founder is from Switzerland, another yacht for a Croatian client and several more constructions in their more advanced stages of contracting.
“Over the next month or two, we’ll have secured jobs for the whole of 2023 and 2024,” Tramontana pointed out, for whom the big change in business is the fact that the company has been managing to secure financing for the majority of new jobs itself, without needing to rely on state guarantees.
Brodotrogir Cruise otherwise currently employs 150 workers and cooperates with around 15 subcontractors.
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