Largest in Business: We reveal the biggest players in Slovakia

Hundreds of companies and institutions filled out questionnaires for the Largest in Business yearbook. The latest edition is available in our online shop.

In this story, you will find out which company paid the most in taxes, and which are the largest aquaparks and ski resort.

The rankings cover 50 different categories and show which sectors and companies have grown the most.

In this shorter online version of the story, you can read about all the top-ranked companies. More comprehensive results with detailed information about the largest companies are available in the yearbook, Largest in Business.

This project has been created in cooperation with Sme daily, and the FinStat company. The key parameter for the rankings was revenue, but in some categories it was a combination of several criteria, such as turnover or number of employees. Within the financial sector, the ranking was typically based on asset values.

Strong economic pillar

Shared service centres (BSCs) contributed more than €770 million to the state budget in employment taxes and levies last year. The largest of them is the American firm IBM.

Other important brands operating in this segment are AT&T, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Henkel and Swiss Re.

New employees working in shared service and business service centres will need a different set of skills compared to their predecessors if they are to be successful in the future, experts in the sector said.

While a decade ago, expert knowledge in a highly specialised field was highly sought after, companies in the sector will in future be looking for a combination of soft and hard skills; the latter, for example, in finance or programming.

“This will provide a good base from which an employee can grow,” said Peter Rusiňák, coordinator of the Business Service Center Forum (BSCF) at AmCham Slovakia.

He added that centres will still need accountants five years from now, but what they do and how they perform their assignments, as well as the tools they use, will change going forward.

Among the fields most commonly cited as areas for future jobs are cyber security, artificial intelligence, data science, customer experience, and sustainability.

“As a centre, if we don’t take an interest in sustainability, young potential employees will not consider working for us at all,” said Tomáš Polakovič, business analysis actuarial services lead at Zurich Competence Centre in Bratislava, adding that this is a trend the centre has already noticed.

Trade

Until 2019, the largest retailer in Slovakia was the British chain Tesco, but then it was overtaken by the German supermarket chain Lidl. Last year brought another change in the top three.