Surprisingly good business results for some companies with zero employees.
Although companies usually have at least one employee, more than a quarter of companies in Croatia actually do not employ anybody. However, that does not mean they cannot have multimillion revenues and profits, reports Poslovni.hr on September 1, 2016.
The first place on the 2015 ranking of business without any employees by total income belongs to the state-owned Plomin Thermal Power Plant, which had revenues of as much as 659 million kuna, Since last year, the company is 100 percent owned by Croatian Electrical Company (HEP). The list of companies by profit is headed by Cervesia Zagreb with 163 million kuna in profits (income from dividends), which owns the Zagreb Brewery, while the ultimate owner is American brewery Molson Coors.
There are more well-known names among companies without employees: Heineken Adria, the Zagreb Tobacco Factory, and Inprox Zagreb Sesvete, a company that was for years renting properties for Baumax. Both companies from the brewing industry – Cervesia and Heineken – are owners of breweries, so the assets of Cervesia amount to about two billion kuna, while Heineken has about 0.9 billion kuna in assets, which further confirms enormous differences in terms of the value of assets among companies without employees, whose number is constantly growing.
In recent years, “only” a quarter of all Croatian businesses were companies without employees, but last year they accounted for as much as 30.4 percent of all businesses. Their total losses in 2015 stood at about 3.4 billion kuna. Last year, of 106,569 companies (excluding banks and other financial institutions), 32,402 companies had no employees. Interestingly, only about five percent of companies were dormant, while about 95 percent were active, with the total revenues of 13.6 billion kuna, which confirms that these are not just some “phantom companies”. Obviously, doing business without employees is a popular business model. Among various sectors, the largest number of such companies operates in the areas of trade (7,258 companies), professional, scientific and technical activities (4,733) and construction (4,153).
