The 50 largest food industry companies have the power to change the trends on their markets since their revenue accounts for one third of the total revenue of the sector, where 8,400 businesses operate.
The sales of the 50 largest manufacturers that operate plants in Romania have risen by 35% in the last six years, with multinationals seeing their revenue up 42%, while the Romanian entrepreneurs’ revenue rose just 26% between 2008 and 2013.
“Companies in the food industry have developed over the last six years. Those with a good management managed to find markets, sell, tap into new segments, while others lagged behind and even disappeared,” says Bara Levente, owner of spice producer Supremia in Alba Iulia, a business that generates EUR32 million revenue a year.
He says that a significant part of the entrepreneurs that did grow or preserved their business in the last six years had their own retail networks.
“Those who had retail [operations] were those who grew or avoided decline. Guaranteed retail sales was one component along with management,” Bara Levente says.
Romania is the seventh largest market in the EU and Romanian consumers allocate 30% of their spending to food, the second highest percentage of the 28 EU economies.
The food industry companies that make the most money out of the fifty top players are meat processors (EUR889 million), vegetable oil producers (EUR842 million), sugar producers (EUR500 million), while the rest is divided among milling & bakery and sweets, coffee or spice companies.
The 26 multinational companies among the top 50 food industry businesses posted EUR2.4 billion revenue together last year, 42% more than in 2008. The overall industry growth was driven in part by the growth of Austrian-held Agrana (up 69%), France’s Expur (up 55%) and Swiss-owned Nestle (up 550%).
Romanian entrepreneurial businesses made progress too, such as Transavia (Ioan Popa), Unicarm (Vasile Lucut) and Prutul (Marian Andreev), which posted more than EUR100 million revenue each last year and were the only Romanian-owned food industry companies that did so.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)