In compliance with the provisions of the Ljubljana Stock Exchange Rules and the applicable legislation, the company Luka Koper, d. d. hereby publishes the following notification:  

At its session (26 Mar 2018), the company’s supervisory board discussed the progress of the company’s business restructuring and became acquainted with the proposal of strategy for port services providers (hereinafter: IPS) prepared by the company’s management board. As Uroš Ilić, president of the supervisory board, stated after the meeting, the supervisory board proposed to the management board to have the strategy verified and supported also by external legal opinions, especially in terms of legal admissibility, cost-effectiveness, independency and business performance. In the meantime, the management board will elaborate an action plan for the strategy implementation and will begin with key preparatory actions.  

»During the strategy elaboration process, an intense social- and professional dialogue was carried on with the objective of reaching a lawful and commercially sustainable solution,” stated Dimitrij Zadel, president of the company’s management board. He could not go into detail since the strategy must first be verified by external experts and supported by an action plan determining the strategy’s implementation time-schedule. Namely, the strategy also involves the adaptation of organisation and working processes at the Port of Koper, as well as the establishing of centralised planning of both processes and workers, which will also influence the required number of recruitments.  

»The new model anticipates that the company will provide core services mainly by means of own workforce. In smaller part, the company will avail itself of employment agencies since it is technically unfeasible to employ so many people at one time and train them for the job. However, one quarter of services will be entrusted to external contracted companies, similarly to other ports«, explained the president of the management board.

A key difference between the new and the previous IPS approach is that external service companies will provide comprehensive and complete services, which was a basic legal deficiency of the old IPS system. The new model will also have an impact on the company’s business results, however, its scope will be clearer as soon as the action plan is approved and the budget is amended which will most likely happen by the end of the first half of the year.