“The reasons for this decline are both the lack of government-funded projects, which quite tentatively started as late as the last part of the year and the fact that people would rather save their money for rainy days,” Barbut says.
The company posted 110 million lei (EUR25.2 million) in revenue in the first nine months, up about 8% from the same period last year. Barbut says this was due to the product range diversification and the fact that the AdePlast brand had reached maturity. Another factor was the opening of a polystyrene plant in Ploiesti.
The company expects revenue to reach RON135 million (EUR31 million) by yearend and Barbut intends to invest a further over EUR10 million in building a special manufacturing area in Moldova in 2012.
On the other hand, Henkel, another important company on the construction materials market, managed to boost adhesives sales by 5% in the first nine months of 2011.
“The third quarter was encouraging because significant projects for which we made deliveries were completed, such as the National Arena (national stadium in Bucharest) or the Maritimo shopping center in Constanta (SE Romania), ” says Andrei Dumitrescu, marketing and sales manager of the adhesives division of Henkel, who estimates local market decline in 2011 to stand betweern 3% and 5%.
Henkel has recently begun construction work on an adhesives plant in Roznov, Neamt County (NE Romania), to be able to meet demand during peak season, i.e. August and September. The plant will increase Henkel’s construction supplies production capacity in Romania by almost 40%, to 700,000 tons per year. Its other two plants in this country, in which it has already invested EUR30 million, produce up to 500,000 tons of adhesives and other construction supplies a year.
Henkel expects its adhesives division to see single-digit growth in 2011. Henkel Romania’s revenue last year went down by almost 2% to EUR133 million, but the company does not provide any details about the share of adhesives in total sales on the local market, where it has other operations, too.
Henkel and AdePlast compete with Baumit (Austria) and Duraziv (Daniel Guzu) on a Romanian market estimated at some EUR180 million.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)