Production in Volkswagen Slovakia. (source: Sme)
While the total number of Slovak companies increased by six to 45, the first, Volkswagen Slovakia with a turnover of €7.2 billion and year-on-year growth of more than 17 percent, jumped by one position to ninth place, the TASR newswire reported based on the ranking CEE Top 500 of Coface Slovakia consulting company.
“Slovak companies strengthened their position y-o-y and the estimate for 2016 confirms the positive outlook for employment, growth and total output expressed in sales volume,” said Coface’s CEO Juraj Janči.
All the top 500 companies from central and eastern Europe achieved a turnover of €593 billion. While 218 companies improved their rank, 66 are completely new including Slovak Tesco, Tate & Lyle Slovakia, IKEA, Strabag, Slovalco and ZF Slovakia.
In the Slovak top ten, only the automotive companies Volkswagen Slovakia (17.1 percent), second Kia Motors Slovakia (10.6 percent), fifth PCA Slovakia (17 percent) and tenth Mobis Slovakia (11 percent) increased turnover last year. The Slovak top three Slovnaft paid for a drop in sales and at the regional level it fell by three places to 22nd, TASR wrote.
Janči also expects that industry in 2016 will be driven by the automotive sector followed by the production of electronics and electrical equipment.
“We are pleased that despite the limitations of quality indicators such as scale, number of workforce and so on, the sales volume per employee has risen,” said Janči, as quoted by TASR.
In particular, the planned arrival of the Jaguar Land Rover automotive company, which wants to start Slovak production in 2018 and invest at least €1 billion will cause even greater dependence by Slovakia on vehicle sales, said Grzegorz Sielewicz, Coface’s main analyst for CEE. The country is the largest producer of vehicles per number of residents, 184 vehicles per 1000 persons, in the world.
Moreover, Coface pointed out that the better performance of Slovak companies has benefited from the positive development of the economy for which 2015 with 3.6 percent growth was the most powerful of the last four years, mainly due to drawing out EU funds and the increase in domestic consumption.
The largest number of companies in TOP 500 of CEE are based in Poland (167), the Czech Republic (71) and Hungary (69), TASR reported.
