Actually…

…I usually like it when life is busy, there is bustling and running around all day, but right now it feels like too much, with everything changing around us, and we can’t even get our heads around things fast enough. One day it is mandatory promotions, the next day it is waste fee, the third day it is price monitoring, meanwhile the 2024 draft budget arrives and the extra taxes are still on the agenda, what is more, with a bigger sum, and then there is the rise in public health product tax (NETA), in the excise duty and what not. Obviously, all of the latter are price-raising items, but then how will we make plans for a rapidly decreasing single-digit inflation…?

This article is available for reading in Trade magazin 2023/6-7.

As the topics are piling up for our Business Days conference in September, I sometimes think how great it would be to have a boring, topic-free event with no issues to discuss, because the main issue would simply be that there are no topics – but it seems that not only I, but also the participants will have to wait, because the time hasn’t come for this yet, not this year.

The days, weeks and months are passing by at a breakneck speed, we are barely past last September, when we gave ourselves a good shock of what to expect – and I am beginning to feel that a self-fulfilling prophecy is unfolding on all fronts, when in fact the end of last year and the beginning of this year were still quite hopeful. Then the avalanche began and there is a surprise almost every day.

I am excited to hear what further opportunities and directions the speakers and roundtable discussion members at the Business Days conference will see, and how and to what extent they will shape the adaptability expected from a flexible management in this environment – because actually it is becoming difficult to tell exactly what kind of market environment we have to adapt to now…?

But in the meantime, we are diligently writing articles, reporting on what is happening and the future directions that are currently valid – which may be different tomorrow, but perhaps what we write about the past in our reports won’t change. But who knows? At best, we will rewrite it, according to the then current state of things.

Let’s meet on 25-29 September in Tapolca, at the Business Days conference, and let’s discuss together what has really happened in the year since the last meeting, and what we can do in the current situation to anticipate what is about to come. The conference programme, which is constantly expanding, is available at businessdays.hu!

Everyone is welcome!

Best regards,

Zsuzsanna Hermann,  Editor in Chief