I always found difficult to write about doing business in Romania, my home country. It’s easier to write about doing business elsewhere because I don’t have any emotional implications and I can write freely what I believe. I did however finally found a quite realistic overview here and I will just comment on the article because it’s easier this way.
Doing business in Romania preview
Probably the most important thing to understand is that business over here don’t always follow the usual market logic. For example, you would expect that is the economy is weak the exchange rate should go up? Not necessarily. You would expect that because the per capita income is not so great you won’t see any expensive cars on the street? Well, you’re wrong. Plenty of Ferrari here.
Legalities when starting a business in Romania
The BucharestExpat article basically says you should get legal help if you want to start a business here. Truth is that laws are complicated, incomplete and always made to get you on the wrong foot. It almost seems that running a business here is more about getting papers done than providing a service for your customers. Plenty gray areas too.
Employees
You can read about dealing with Romanian employees on the original article. My view is that you can classify the Romanian employees in about 3 categories:
- highly skilled professionals willing to prove what they can do. I wrote some articles a few years ago that Romanian employees working abroad are usually highly appreciated because they need to prove what they know and what they can do.
- average employees that are satisfied with what they do and have accomplished and don’t intend to make changes
- haters. They hate their job, hate their boss and do almost everything possible to avoid work.
Marketing and advertising
You would be amazed about the huge quantities of advertising is done on the streets, on TV and everywhere else. Probably because we didn’t have marketing at all 20 years ago, it’s still very easy to obtain sales with basic advertising and marketing.
The good parts
I would start by saying that the best news is that there are plenty of opportunities and untapped market areas. There is less competition than you would expect in a lot of areas which basically means you just need to find a good niche and money will follow.
Workforce is cheaper, including for the highly skilled professionals. Although with Romania joining the European Union wages have increased (and cost of life) you can still get good deals on workforce.
It’s in the European Community. It offers most of the advantages offered by the European Community (example: no taxes when exporting say to Germany) while production costs might be cheaper.
