Bittnet Systems, the largest local provider of IT&C training services and the flight-booking portal Vola sold minority stakes, while online travel agency Paravion.ro made an acquisition in Turkey; the three deals announced this week highlighted the ebullience in the local IT and online industry, which is rising fast compared with other segments of the economy.
“I am looking at those we work with – major companies, multinationals, and see that everyone is trying to get into the IT business in Romania. There’s a lot of excitement in Cluj, Iasi and obviously in Bucharest, where the center of this ebullience is,” Cristian Logofatu, chief financial officer of Bittnet Systems, says.
“We believe IT sill see an even greater boom in Romania in 2015 than it had until last year.”
The company provided training services to more than 1,000 people last year, 200-250 of whom referred by companies and the rest college and high school students. Growth will continue in 2015, Logofatu added.
“This year appears very promising. Projects postponed in the past have now been greenlighted: plants are expanding, companies are expanding their business, too. I am now working on three call-center, unified communication center projects, each of which worth more than $100,000 we are implementing. We have also recently completed a $400,000 project for a company that has just bought a competitor.”
After having discussed with a number of private equity firms and private investors in the past year before signing with Polish private equity firm Carpathia Capital, the Bittnet official says he found out Romania is on the map of investors interested in IT.
“In a word, we have a nearshoring trend – major companies are saying, “We’re not going to India, we’re coming to Europe because we speak the same language, we are in the same time zone.”
Besides growth from the development and IT services centers of multinational or local companies, the industry is also growing as the customers in Romania and the region migrate to online, driven by the surge in smartphone, tablet and mobile Internet service sales.
The flight booking market totaled about EUR400 million last year, 15% of which or at least 3 million ticket sales generated by the online part of the business Remus Visan, managing director paravion.ro said on ZF Live on Wednesday. “In Romania, 15% to 20% of the plane ticket sales are done online – I mean here the whole process from booking to payment done online.”
The investment attracted by Bittnet and Vola and the acquisition made by Paravion, backed by Ged Capital fund, show the new generation of entrepreneurs is on the map of international private equity firms. The first major deal that put Romania on the global IT map was the 2003 acquisition by Microsoft of the antivirus technology created by Gecad, a company built by Romanian Radu Georgescu. The Gecad founder later saw several other successful exits from businesses started from scratch.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)