70 Years of Setting the Pace

On 16 March 1954, the company Centralna skladišča (i.e. Central Warehouses), the predecessor of today’s BTC Company, was founded. Among the fields and meadows of what used to be a suburb of Ljubljana, it began to build warehouses to meet the needs of Ljubljana’s industry and commerce. In 1957, as the company expanded its activities, it was renamed Javna skladišča (i.e. Public Warehouses). These warehouses brought together all of Ljubljana’s warehousing activity in one place.

Owing to its excellent business performance, the company Javna skladišča expanded, and in 1965, with its premises covering a surface area of 68,867 m², it became the largest goods and customs warehouse in Yugoslavia, able to accommodate as many as 35 wagons at a time. The company began to contribute not only to the development of trade in Ljubljana, but also to increasing the country’s import and export turnover.

In 1975, the company was renamed Blagovno-transportni center (i.e. Goods and Transport Centre) Ljubljana and continued on its path of success by expanding its business operations and building warehousing facilities in other major Slovenian cities, including Murska Sobota and Novo mesto.

By 1987, the physical expansion of the company’s premises had made it one of Europe’s largest land terminals and at the same time opened a new chapter in its story. As the market economy gradually took hold, parts of the warehousing facilities were used for trade. In 1990, the company was renamed Blagovno trgovinski center (i.e. Goods and Trade Centre) or BTC. It was transformed into a public limited company and opened its first stores, which were innovative at the time and received an overwhelming response by customers. In 1993, the BTC Company opened the first shopping centre in Slovenia in Ljubljana, with the BTC Kratochwill pub as its first food and beverage service provider.

The BTC Company gradually expanded the services and activities on offer in its shopping centre. In 1995, we opened the BTC Open Market and built the Mercurius Congress Hall; in 1999, we launched Sports Centre Millenium, and a year later, we founded the theatre Teater Komedija, the forerunner of today’s SiTi Teater BTC, which offered creative opportunities to many an artist. In this way, BTC City Ljubljana gained a new dimension besides shopping – leisure and entertainment. In 2000, all retailers and other service providers were brought under the umbrella of the BTC City brand. In 2001, BTC City saw the addition of the BTC Business Tower. Following the successful launch of BTC City in Ljubljana in 1998, in 2001 the logistics centres in Murska Sobota and Novo mesto were transformed into shopping centres as well. In 2000, we intensified our logistics activity with the construction of the BTC Logistics Centre in Ljubljana. As supporters of sport and active leisure, we became the proud general sponsor of the Marathon Franja BTC City gran fondo in 2002.

The development of BTC City Ljubljana continued unabated. In 2005, we opened the Atlantis Water Park and in 2011 the Crystal Palace, at that time the tallest office building in Slovenia. The sixth decade also saw the establishment of a new business pillar. In 2012, we began to offer comprehensive real estate management services to business partners as part of our BTC PROP business unit. During this decade, we further enhanced the sustainability dimension of our development. In 2008, we developed an eco-index model to monitor the company’s green development, and in 2011, we installed the first solar power plant on the roof of the BTC Logistics Centre, with a projected annual production capacity of 1 million kWh. In 2012, we combined all our sustainability efforts to form a new business pillar: Mission Green. Another one of our big sponsorship stories during this time was our support of the FIS Ski Jumping World Cup for women in Ljubno ob Savinji.

Innovation and openness to new opportunities and solutions, which have always accompanied the BTC company’s development, also stepped to the forefront in the company’s seventh decade. We reached an important milestone in 2015 with the establishment of the ABC Accelerator, the first startup accelerator in Slovenia, and the innovation-focused ABC Hub. Soon after, in 2016, the new business pillar BTC DIGIT was established to advance digitisation and an innovative business environment. In 2017, the BTC company embarked on a technological and digital transformation and founded the BTC Living Lab as a pilot testing environment for advanced solutions. BTC City Ljubljana did not lag behind this spirit of innovation. In 2016, it expanded its culinary offer with the BTC Food Court, and in 2018, it became the world’s first bitcoin city. In this way, BTC City Ljubljana has evolved into an open space with a distinctive character and a variety of content for consumers, visitors, business partners and others. It is also becoming a central venue for major international events. As the number of visitors continued to grow, we took care to upgrade the area’s infrastructure. In 2017, we were co-signatories to an agreement on the development of new investments and upgrades of the existing transport infrastructure in the wider Ljubljana-Moste area; a thorough infrastructure upgrade of the area was successfully completed in 2023.