Company heads in Serbia expect corporate growth in 2015

BELGRADE - Over a half of corporate leaders in Serbia expect their companies to grow in the year to come, shows the Capital Confidence Barometer research conducted by Ernst & Young (EY) consulting house.

Around 50 percent of corporate heads in Serbia believe that the number of opportunities for acquisition has increased and the research envisages that certain acceleration should take place in the merging area and in acquisitions in the region of central and south-east Europe, which will come as a result of major transformative business transactions.

Asked whether they expect their company to perform acquisitions in the year to come, 39 percent of the interviewees in Serbia replied positively, while as many as 87 percent of corporate heads expect their companies to achieve growth in the year to come through acquisitions.

Asked about the chief source of funding of business transactions in the next 12 months, all corporate leaders (100 percent) noted that funding would be covered by banks, private sources and public bond issue.

After several years of contraction and stagnation, it seems that the business transaction market in the region is on the path to recovery thanks to the mean value transactions which are expected to restore the market to the position it occupied prior to the financial crisis, the EY research shows. The research was conducted with the help from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) which gathers heads of major companies in the region and which this year also included heads from Serbia as well for the first time.

The research has shown that a half of corporate heads in Serbia are focusing on corporate growth in the next 12 months, which bears minimum difference compared to the response of...