A Decade of Change in the Market for Corporate Control in Croatia: A Descriptive Analysis Before and After Eurozone Accession

Abstract

Croatia joined the Eurozone on January 1, 2023, becoming the twentieth member state and the first late-accession peripheral economy to do so under post-pandemic macroeconomic conditions. Despite the significance of this integration, the literature lacks a comprehensive evaluation of how this transition affected the local market for corporate control, including sectors of strategic relevance to Croatia's economy such as maritime activities. The primary aim of this paper is to provide the first descriptive analysis of the Croatian M&A landscape around this institutional breakpoint. The paper uses a descriptive research design to systematically observe and compare market dynamics across two distinct periods. Data on M&A transactions are drawn from the Orbis M&A database, covering a full decade from 2015 to 2025. The final sample includes 453 completed M&A transactions involving Croatian non-financial firms, spanning industries from manufacturing and tourism to maritime and transport-related sectors. To isolate the potential effects of monetary integration, we divide the dataset into a pre-euro period (2015–2022) and a post-euro period (2023–2025). We track changes in transaction volume, cross-border versus domestic ratios, target industry categories, and deal value brackets, comparing domestic temporal trends against the broader EU-27 benchmark. Croatian M&A deal counts during the post-euro period remained two to three times higher than the 2015 baseline, while the wider EU-27 benchmark experienced a contraction. The share of cross-border transactions decreased by 11.7% following integration. This decline resulted from a rapid expansion in domestic acquisition activity rather than an absolute reduction in foreign buyer interest. In terms of sectoral distribution, manufacturing became the primary target industry, accounting for 20.7% of all post-euro deals. This sharply displaced the accommodation and food services sector, which had historically accounted for a significant portion of transactions. The professional, scientific, and technical activities sector experienced the largest positive shift, increasing from 5.2% to 14.5% of total targets. Analysis of the limited disclosed-value subsample indicates that deal values consolidated toward the mid-market range. The divergence between surging domestic M&A activity and the contracting European benchmark indicates a strong, country-specific effect. Furthermore, the redirection of capital toward professional and scientific services, alongside a sharp decline in the tourism and hospitality sector, suggests a structural adjustment toward knowledge-intensive activities. The findings highlight that joining a currency union under complex macroeconomic conditions produces distinct, localized market responses, setting an empirical baseline for future causal research on institutional transitions and the market for corporate control.