Although he did not reveal the value of the contract citing confidentiality reasons, Andrew Sibley, Desso’s sales and marketing director for emerging markets, said his company won the contract “after an exhaustive tendering process with the project’s management team.” He admits that Romanian companies competed in the race for Petrom’s contract but the final ‘battle’ was fought by Desso and the Germans at Toucan.
“From the start of the Petrom City negotiations we met with many Romanian competitors because this project was one of the best known and visible in 2010,” Sibley said. “We were also competing against every major international carpet producer with a presence on the Romanian market. By the end stage, we were competing against Toucan.”
Romanian carpet manufacturers have had a rough time over the last few years, with the top two producers, Incov Alba Iulia and Covtex Cisnadie, currently insolvent, stifled by high manufacturing costs. The costs for their machine-made carpets are the same as those of hand-made carpets from India and Pakistan. They are now battling arrearage and have turned to customers buying carpets for their homes.
Under the circumstances, Netherlands’ Desso won the contract with Petrom City, which ZF estimates at more than EUR1 million.
The company has been selling its carpets in Romania since
2004.
Petrom City is a 100,000-square meter development including five
buildings: two oval-shaped administrative buildings called
Infinity, a classic-shaped building, Tower, a data center and a 5
MW power plant. It required almost 40,000 square meters of carpet
tiles (4 hectares) nearly as much as the cumulated surface area of
six soccer fields.