However, the ten companies are far from the largest company in Romania, OMV Petrom (SNP.RO), whose turnover stood at EUR4.4 billion last year, even with their revenue combined.
Only four Romanian companies posted more than RON2 billion revenue in 2012, while 11 businesses started by local entrepreneurs from scratch posted more than one billion lei revenue last year. With such results, no local company can make it into the top 20 largest companies in Romania, a ranking dominated by multinationals in the oil and gas, telecom and retail industries.
“If we had entrepreneurship dating back to more than fifty years ago, we could have compared to the ‘big names’ of the world but we are still ‘young’ in this department and cannot compare a local company started in the nineties and gone through five years of crisis with a multinational that comes with know-how from abroad, financial support from a parent company and a well-oiled structure,” says Cristian Bisa, manager of consultancy platform manageranticriza.ro (anti-crisis manager, which includes surveys for 40 markets).
He added it was more relevant to compare the results of the Romanian companies with those of the multinationals in the fields where they compete directly, operating on more fragmented markets and which do not require high initial investment.
Oil is a market almost completely dominated by multinationals, but Oscar Downstream managed to carve its niche on it by becoming the biggest oil company distributing diesel that is not part of a foreign group.
Dedeman, Arabesque and Ambient Sibiu are companies that left international giants like Praktiker and Bricostore behind, building the most powerful trio in the construction supplies retail and wholesale. Altex has been the leader of the electrical and computer retail for years, while no Romanian company has made it to top ten food retailers.
Romanian entrepreneurs are also powerful in the cold cuts business (Vasile Lucut, Unicarm), car imports (Tiriac Group), construction (Dorinel Umbrarescu), industrial equipment (Constantin Toma – Grup Romet), insurance (Dan Adamescu), pharmaceutical wholesale, private clinics, law firms and winemaking industries.
“Many Romanian entrepreneurs own several companies and it would have been relevant for us to have group data for these companies,” Bisa says, explaining there are no private local companies with one billion euro revenue in the ranking.
The group of businessman Ioan Niculae, for instance, would be a EUR800 million business if combining the revenue of Interagro SA and Interagro SRL. The businessman also owns other chemical and food companies, therefore the total revenue exceeds EUR1 billion. The ranking ZF compiled only took into account the fiscal entities.
The ten largest Romanian-owned companies employ more than 20,000 people together, 5,000 more than in 2010. The most active employers in 2010-2012 were retailer Dedeman, telecom company RCS&RDS and electrical and computer retailer Altex. (EUR1=RON4.442)
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)