The city’s industry was ruined in the wake of the early ‘90s’ plunder, set of hasty privatizations and a real estate boom that turned the land plots underneath the former industrial platforms into “goldmines”.
From the eastern side of the city, from Faur and Republica, where tens of thousand employees manufactured rolling stock and pipes, to the west, on the banks of Dambovita, at Semanatoarea, and from south, from IMGB platform, to industrial platform Pipera in the north, most plants have been demolished, so that the production units now employing the biggest number of people are Romaero (921 employees), Vulcan (832 employees) and General Turbo (773).
Too few of the plants that have been pulled down to make room for real estate projects were moved to the city’s outskirts. One of the few exceptions is Timpuri Noi, whose land plot of Bucharest was bought by Swedish billionaire Ingvar Kamprad, the owner of IKEA. The shareholders of Timpuri Noi moved the plant to Jilava, but its number of employees slid from 2,700 in the ‘90s to 86 last year.
Republica and Rocar are under bankruptcy, Semanatoarea has 9 employees left, Pumac’s activity is reduced to zero employees and revenue and the land plot has been put up for sale for the development of an office project, in the context where 700,000 of Bucharest’s 900,000 employees now work in services, for banks, IT companies, but also in hypermarkets, where salaries are close to the minimum level per economy.
The largest employers headquartered now in Bucharest are Posta Romana, CFR SA, OMV Petrom, Romsilva, Kaufland and RATB, with these as the only companies that still have more than 10,000 employees each, but their activity unfolds at the tens of work points registered countrywide.
As regards production, there still are a series of apparel and footwear plants operational in Bucharest and around it, but these have scaled back their activity, and a series of food industry production facilities.
(English version by Catalina Apostoiu)