The story
Background
The "Zagreb Stock Exchange for the goods and values" was co-founded by the Department of Goods and Values of the Association of Industrialists and Traders of Croatia and Slavonia under Milivoj Crnadak and Samuel David Alexander in 1907, as an attempt to claim more independence from the authorities in Budapest, beyond the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement. It operated until 1911, when it was shut down by the Croat-Serb Coalition which instead wanted to promote the use of the exchange in Belgrade. It was secretly restarted in 1917 during World War I, and formally reopened in 1919 in Yugoslavia. In 1945, after World War II, the stock exchange stopped operating. In 1946, the stock exchange formally ceased to exist as it was confiscated by the new communist authorities of Yugoslavia.
History
The ZSE was established between 1989 and 1991 at the initiative of the banks of the then-SR Croatia and Zajednica osiguranja osoba i imovine Croatia. It listed the first securities in 1992. It also supported the process of privatization in Croatia. In 1994, it deployed its first electronic distributed trading system. In 1995, it deployed its first website with the help of CARNET.
A separate exchange in Varaždin was founded in 1993. In March 2007 the Varaždin Stock Exchange (VSE) was incorporated into the ZSE, forming a single Croatian capital market, leading in the region by market capitalization and trading volume. As of 31 December 2016, ZSE's total market capitalization was 232.4 billion kn (€30.8 billion).
In 2015, the Zagreb Stock Exchange purchased the Ljubljana Stock Exchange (Ljubljanska borza) from the Wiener Börse. In 2020, the exchange acquired a 5.3% ownership stake of the Macedonian Stock Exchange (MSE) and further raised its stake in the Macedonian Stock Exchange up to 29.98% in August 2022.
In November 2024, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the stock exchanges from eight Central and Eastern Europe countries (Bratislava Stock Exchange, Budapest Stock Exchange, Bucharest Stock Exchange, Bulgarian Stock Exchange, Ljubljana Stock Exchange, Warsaw Stock Exchange and Zagreb Stock Exchange) signed a Memorandum of Understanding for deepening their cooperation, in order to strengthen liquidity and attract investors. Building upon this agreement, the Finance ministers of the eight countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) signed in August 2025 a Memorandum of Understanding for formalizing their cooperation in order to foster the common development of their capital markets, through regulatory alignment and increased market integration.
From Wikipedia’s article on Zagreb Stock Exchange, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3