News Release

The operation of state-owned/public enterprises through the prism of financial indicators 2015-2019

Today (15.01.2021) the Center for Civil Communications (CCC) published the Financial analysis of the operation of state/public enterprises in 2015-2019 and the database that allows downloading the final accounts of enterprises.

Subject of the financial analysis was the 30 largest enterprises established by the state and the local self-government units. These are enterprises whose total revenues in 2019 amounted to MKD 44,992,939.558, or EUR 732 million. At the end of 2019 they employed a total of 22 140 employees. The analysis was conducted on the basis of five groups of financial indicators from the annual accounts of the enterprises for the period 2015-2019.
These are indicators of profitability, efficiency, financial stability, cost-efficiency and liquidity of the enterprises. The analysis detects the condition and the success in the operation of all 30 enterprises together and each of them separately. This is an extension of last year’s analysis, the purpose of which is to summarize in one place the information on the financial operations of enterprises established by the state and local self-government units. Part of the summary findings point to the following:

• 30 largest enterprises established by the state and local self-government in the period 2019-2015 increased the generated total revenues by only 2%.
• The average rate of profitability in the analysed 5-year period reached modest 6%, and in 2019, the profitability has seen a certain improvement (6.5%). The assets owned by these enterprises with such a profit would be restored in 38 years, whereas the invested and earned capital would be returned in 32 years. In the private sector, the period of return on invested capital is usually 10 years.
• Collection of receivables of the analysed companies is a weak link in their operation as it is 253 days in the 5-year period, i.e., 205 days in 2019. Such long collection deadlines are associated with occasional write-offs of receivables for financial reporting purposes.
• They pay their liabilities within even longer deadlines, in 484 days on average, i.e., 365 days in 2019. Usually in the business environment, companies with such long payment deadlines are avoided or, due to their payment deadlines, are offered significantly higher prices than the market prices.
• Creditworthiness shows that the total debts of the analysed enterprises are slightly higher than their capital and reserves, whereas the level of self-financing is in the safe zone (88% on average in 5 years, i.e. 91% in 2019).
• The analysed enterprises manage to achieve positive operation by fully covering their total expenses and generating revenue surplus of 4% (3% in 2019).
• The analysed enterprises have sufficient cash to cover their short-term liabilities.

Individual analysis was also conducted for all enterprises.

The research was conducted within the project "Integrity and Anti-corruption in the Business Sector", funded by the European Union.