Comparative analysis of business performance of SMEs in the food sector in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia

The main objective of this research is to make comparative analysis of the core business performance on the sample of a hundred small and medium enterprises in the food sector in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. The analysis will comprise eight most important financial indicators of business operating of the enterprises in this sector by which the success of their business, with the primary use of benchmarking methodology is measured. Benchmarking methodology basically uses the Balances Scorecard model principles. On this basis, a model of the international database of over 100,000 companies from 24 countries has been created. This database has been used as a basis of comparison (benchmarking) of business performance of individual companies, and Bosnia-Herzegovina is the first country in the region that has been involved in it.The authors chose neighboring countries (Croatia and Serbia) for the comparison because Bosnia-Herzegovina has had a significant trade with them, and as BH, they underwent economic transition as well and they are, in addition to the regional, also direct competitors at the EU market. The research will be conducted with the use of different statistical methods and applicable use of SPSS software. The analysis will primarily relate to the period of 2007-2011 years. This research should determine the competitiveness of enterprises in the food sector in the three neighboring countries, and in which areas the competitiveness is most significant. The aim of the work is to, with the use of identical financial indicators, determine how the small and medium enterprises in the food sector in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia operated. In this way it will become known in which business fields the companies from the stated three countries produce the best results, but also it will be observed in which country the food industry suffered the greatest losses as a result of the global financial crisis.