By Radomir Ralev
Slovenian energy company Petrol led the SEE TOP 20 revenue per capita ranking for the thirteenth consecutive year with revenue per capita of 1,747 euro in 2019 compared with 1,761 euro in 2018. The company took the fourth place in the overall ranking of the biggest companies in Southeast Europe for 2019, down from the second place a year earlier.
Slovenia, an EU member state of some two million and the only Eurozone member state in SEE, maintained its dominance in this year’s edition of the revenue per capita ranking. As many as eleven Slovenian companies entered the list and seven of them were in the top ten of the chart. Moreover, companies based in Slovenia took four of the top five spots.
Slovenia’s Petrol, Bulgaria’s Lukoil Neftochim Burgas and Croatia’s INA were the only entrants in the SEE TOP 20 Per Capita ranking, which were also among the top 10 in the SEE TOP 100 companies ranking.
Romania, the region’s biggest economy and most populated country of 20 million, had no entries in the top 20 per capita ranking for yet another year.
Seven entrants in the ranking saw their revenue per capita decline versus five a year earlier.
However, the average revenue per capita of the companies in the chart rose to 616 euro in 2019 from 597.5 euro in 2018.
Slovenian energy company GEN-I took the silver for the fifth year in a row, although its revenue per capita declined to 1,092 euro from 1,158 euro a year earlier.
The North Macedonia-based unit of UK specialty chemicals company Johnson Matthey gained one position and ranked third with 8.3% growth in revenue per capita to 913 euro. Johnson Matthey ousted Revoz, the Slovenian unit of France’s Renault, from the third position. For its part, Revoz ranked fourth with a slim 0.5% rise of revenue per capita. This was the only change in the top ten of the ranking.
The 2019 edition of the ranking welcomed two newcomers – Croatia’s Hrvatska Elektroprivreda, which ranked 18th, and Serbia’s Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS) in 20th place. They replaced Montenegro’s China Road & Bridge Corporation (CRBC) and Telekom Slovenije.
Voli Trade and Elektroprivreda Crne Gore, the two Montenegrin representatives in the ranking, were also the only two entrants which were not part of the SEE TOP 100 companies ranking in 2019.
In a breakdown by sector, power utilities again dominated the per capita ranking in 2019, followed by companies from the oil and gas sector. The pharma and retail sectors had two representatives each in the face of Slovenian retailer Poslovni Sistem Mercator and Montenegrin sector player Voli Trade, and Slovenian drug makers Krka and Lek.
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SEE TOP 100 per capita is a ranking based on the same pool of more than 2,900 companies as in SEE TOP 100. The ranking is compiled by dividing the total revenue in euro of each company by the population estimate in the country of registration for the respective year. This benchmark indicates the importance of individual companies for the local economies.