This paper offers a brief survey of the industry in Bjelovar during the socijalist period (1945–1990), with the aim of and focus on explaining and presenting the crisis of the socialist model of government in the late 1980s and the economic transition of three major companies in Bjelovar active in this period (Koestlin; Tomo Vinković; Sirela) to new, private-market businesses following the downfall of Yugoslavia and after the formation of the independent Croatian state. This phase was a difficult one for all three companies; the result was that two of them have survived in the new circumstances, whilst one has not. The choice of the subject companies in this paper as examples of the economic transition of Bjelovar has been partial, so that the conclusions may not be applied to the entire economy of Bjelovar in the socialist period, which has, to the most part, not managed to survive the Croatian model of the economic transition era.