Span Builds Its Growth on International Markets, Business Resilience, and Digital Sovereignty

For Nikola Dujmović, President of the Management Board of Span, the company’s growth is not only a matter of exports, but of broader international positioning in markets where Span can use its own competencies. Croatia is an important starting point, but not the limit of the company’s ambition. “We used to be a major exporter, and now we operate in seven other countries,” Dujmović says, stressing that consolidated results are increasingly shaped by markets outside Croatia.

That direction did not emerge by chance. Span, he says, understood some twenty years ago that the Croatian market alone could not support the full potential of a company focused on demanding engineering work. “We could not achieve in Croatia what we wanted to achieve,” he says, explaining that turning to international customers was a logical choice for a company with strong competencies and clear growth ambitions.

He does not present Span’s development as a simple success story. “We had intelligence, but we also had luck,” he notes. That combination now gives Span room for another step forward. The company already operates in seven countries, while further expansion is the next phase. “We can already see progress, and that makes us happy,” Dujmović says, adding that Span understands the culture of the markets it targets.

A key part of the strategy is knowing where Span can be relevant. Dujmović says the company is not pushing strongly into the most developed Western markets because the competitive balance there is different and the players are much larger. Span is a large company in Croatia, but globally it is aware of its size. “We are very aware of our insignificance in the global context, but we enjoy that,” he says. In that position, Span can compete where it understands business culture, customer needs and delivery realities.

When discussing growth areas, Dujmović argues that technologies can no longer be treated separately. Cloud, cybersecurity, office automation and business applications are merging into one operational whole. “You cannot have cloud without cybersecurity, or cybersecurity without cloud,” he says. Growth is therefore not only in one technology segment, but in the ability to offer a solution that understands the customer’s business model.

In this context, he gives particular weight to business resilience. Cybersecurity is not an end in itself, and protecting only the entry point into a system is not enough. Protection makes sense only when the provider understands what the company is protecting, how it generates revenue and how it keeps operations running. “What is cybersecurity for in a large company? To protect your SAP,” Dujmović says. That is why the boundaries between cloud, security and business systems are disappearing, while the focus shifts toward resilience of the entire organization.

The other major direction he identifies is digital sovereignty. Dujmović believes the coming years will bring pressure to reduce dependence on American technology platforms, especially in relation to data, models and metadata. “That is the biggest pressure now,” he says, linking sovereignty with the European regulatory framework and with different approaches to data in Europe, China and the United States.

For Span, this means the market will not develop around technology alone, but also around trust, regulation and the ability to protect business systems in a broader digital environment. In such an environment, Span sees its opportunity where international experience, technical specialization and an understanding of business resilience meet.