AmCham Slovakia

As we do every month, we would like to inform you about some of the most important AmCham media appearances.  

On the first day of the new year, January 1, our President Gabriel Galgóci was approached by TA3 television in connection with the tightening of the movement due to a pandemic and a mandatory home-office. He said that the productivity of shared service centers has not decreased, but activities which support the mental health of employees were strengthened.

Center for Artificial Intelligence and Assoc. Prof. Michal Gregor, coordinator of the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Žilina, told TASR that the year 2021 will be affected by further innovations - the GPT-3 language model, diagnostics of COVID-19 from the cough and protein folding. The article was taken over by several media in the beginning of January: Hospodárske noviny, dnes.24.sk, openiazoch.zoznam.sk, teraz.sk, cas.sk, fontech.startitup.sk, parlamentnelisty.sk.

On January 7, Trend magazine published a critical article (print & online) on the RRF plan for Slovakia, mentioning the Slovakia vision 2030 initiative and one of its signatories, Pavol Šajgalík.

In connection with the attack in the US Capitol building where the congress is located, Executive Director Ronald Blaško was approached in January 8 to analyze the overall situation and actions of US President Donald Trump: Hospodárske noviny, hnonline.sk, finweb.sk. 
   
Employers' associations, including members of the Rule of Law initiative, have been very critical of the amendment to the Public Procurement Act. The whole issue also had wide media coverage: dennikE, DennikN print, finreport.sk, sportdnes.sk, eurorespekt.sk, ekonomika.sme.sk, webnoviny.sk, 24.hod.sk, akcnezeny.sk etc. Gabriela Šaturová and Michal Krčméry were quoted on behalf of Rule of Law Initiative in Trend magazine (print & online) on January 21.

On January 12, Natália Spodniak wrote a commentary in the SME daily (print and online), which drew attention to the unflattering situation in the Slovak healthcare system, specifically to the need for investment in healthcare innovations and that the cancer patient's journey to treatment takes up to 160 days.

On January 20, an article was published in TREND magazine (print & online) about changes and newspapers in the Labor Code. Peter Rusiňák was one of the addressed experts on this issue.

On January 21, in connection with the importance of caring for the mental health of employees and our December webinar on depression, the najmama.sk portal published an article stating that we need to destigmatize depression in society.

The announced mass dismissals in some BSCF member companies have received a great deal of media attention. AmCham BSCF representative Peter Rusiňák provided the statements for several media: TA3, index.sme.sk, SME,  trend.sk, aktuality.sk, postoj.sk, The Slovak Spectator,  spectator.sme.sk.  An extensive interview with Peter Rusiňák was published in DenníkE on January 27 where he said that the redundancies are not the result of a massive relocation of jobs to India or the policy of the Slovak government, but that this type of business has lost 15-20 percent of contracts globally due to pandemic.

The Slovak Spectator periodical published an extensive print supplement on January 25 concerning business, activities and challenges of shared service centers. They published a lot of interesting data from the BSCF survey, as well as interviews with Peter Rusiňák and Gabriel Galgóci.