One project worth mentioning in 2013 is the Calafat-Vidin bridge, a EUR300 million investment, which improves the road and railway connection between Romania and Bulgaria, while another is the completion of more than 100 kilometers of highway (most of which still not open for traffic but promised for delivery in December).
The year 2013 is also when UK’s home improvement retail chain Kingfisher arrived in Romania, while Henkel, Adeplast and Saint-Gobain opened new production lines for construction materials.
The biggest investments completed in real estate are located on both sides of the Pipera Overpass in northern Bucharest, the Promenada Mall of Raiffeisen Evolution and Floreasca Park office project developed by Portland Trust. The investment in the two amounted to some EUR200 million.
On the other hand, the opening of the H&M store on Lipscani, the main street of Bucharest’s Old Town, can be considered an important event, too, because the area needed the ‘seal of approval’ of an international retailer to speed up retail and building revival in the area.
A new section of the Uranus Boulevard should be delivered by the end of the year, and thus open for traffic from Piata Victoriei to Stirbei Voda Street (in central Bucharest). Work on the new boulevard started more than four years ago.
Business Construct also set out to identify those projects scheduled for completion next year, which include the makeover of the National Theater in Bucharest and the first bridge of the Mihai Bravu overpass.
It should also be noted that work on Line 5 of the Bucharest subway connecting western district Drumul Taberei to the city center were resumed this year and have been making steady progress towards completion in 2016.
Next year should also see the delivery of the first office buildings built in Bucharest by Skanska (Sweden), Atenor (Belgium), and S Group (Czech Republic). A number of shopping center projects have been resumed at the end of this year and it seems the competition between Mega Mall and ParkLake Plaza in eastern Bucharest will be most interesting to watch.
Hope for a rebound of the construction sector is also pinned on the Bucharest beltway, the European Corridor IV highways and the Comarnic-Brasov highway section, the most important local public-private partnership.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)