Outstanding payments of non-financial companies have grown 7% compared with 2009 but dropped nearly 30% compared with the peak reached in 2014, to RON86 billion in 2018. More than half of outstanding payments, or 55%, are outstanding payments to suppliers.
Although the Romanian economy has grown over the past years and 54% of all companies registered profit in 2018, some of the problems of the business environment, such as outstanding payments and staff shortage, have worsened.
Romania has approximately 619,200 non-financial micro-enterprises (with turnovers below EUR2 million) and most of the operate in retail, professional services and constructions.
The average number of days that it takes a company to collect payment after a sale has been made (days sales outstanding – DSO) stood at 91 and the average number of days a company takes to pay its bills and invoices to its trade creditors (days payable outstanding – DPO) stood at 160 in 2018, down from 97 days and 178 days, respectively, in 2009.
The longest payment outstanding terms are in constructions, while the shortest are in retail, the hospitality industry and healthcare. In construction, DSO stood at 178 days and DPO stood at 370 days. In agriculture, DSO stood at 158 days and DPO stood at 268 days. On the other hand, in retail, DSO stood at 60 days and DPO stood at 108 days.
Loans to Romanian companies grew 39% compared with 2009, to RON213 billion in December 2018, according to central bank data. In the first nine months of 2019, loans to local companies grew 7% compared with end-2018, to over RON227 billion.
The biggest growth in lending was registered in agriculture, where loans grew 15%, to nearly RON18 billion in the first nine months of 2019.
In 2018, 42% of loans to companies were granted in the services sector, followed by industry with 27% and constructions with 10%.
Companies’ commercial debt grew 41% compared with 2009, reaching RON284.6 billion in 2018. Commercial debt accounted for 28.7% of the total debt owed by Romanian companies in 2018.
Over the past decade, Romania has lost approximately 300,000 employees in the private sector, as staff numbers dropped from 4.2 million in 2009 to 3.9 million in 2018.
The manufacturing industry employs the most people, nearly 1 million (27.7% of the total), followed by retail with 822,600 employees (21.1% of the total), transport and logistics with 355,000 employees (9.1% of the total) construction with 319,000 employees (8.2% of the total) and administrative and support services with 275,000 employees (7.1% of the total)
The top five sectors by workforce employed 2.8 million people, or 73.2% of all private sector employees in Romania.