“We want to continue operations for as long as possible. We installed protective glass or plastic panes in stores and restricted customer access. We took protection steps in our seeds plants and have a limited number of people in our offices, some of them are working from home,” Octavian Petrescu says.
RodBun is currently employing 440 people, has 13 farms of its own and works 10,800 hectares of land a year, producing a volume of 180,000 tons of grain and some 21,000 tons of seeds. The company distributes agricultural raw material, has a network of 42 stores and also sells grain. It also distributes imported farm equipment.
The group was affected the current pandemic because it was unable to fill some orders because the suppliers were in France and Spain and had transportation issues. The merchandise either arrived late or did not arrive at all.
“This scared farmers, who starting buying lots of inputs, seed or grain because harvesting will begin soon. We have stocks and plan to buy new trucks, have our own fleet for the harvesting time. We were considering making the investment in April, but nothing is certain yet”
RodBun had 64 trucks in 2019, which it sold to refresh its fleet this year.
The crisis “caught us off balance”, Octavian Petrescu says. He means farmers need inputs but do not think they can pay for them at the harvest time either, so the suppliers’ money are frozen. “We continue to sell inputs; we need the sales volume and hope things will go back to normal in two to three months and I’ll see people and tractors in the field.”
The effects of the new coronavirus, a situation that is unpredictable in its development, will be felt on the financial market, too, and the economy will need two to three years to return to where it was before the pandemic.
RodBun, a group founded by entrepreneurs Daniel Muntean and Iancu Alexandru, posted EUR100 million revenue in 2019, flat in 2018 and had 20,000 customers.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)