He wants to turn Madrid Open into the most elitist tournament in the world. He set a five-year deadline for himself to reach a 30 million euro net profit. Until then, he is waiting for the crisis to pass, a crisis that saddens him ”greatly”, but he has a lot of consolidating to do for the businesses in Romania. Together with Ion Ion. Ion Tiriac concentrates on tennis 5% of his time. As for the rest, he says that his businesses in Romania take up ”too much time”.
Business grew very fast in Romania, Ion Tiriac now feels. He admits, though, that his group has to go through a process of consolidation, and in parallel, of gaining market share, for which the crisis is quite a good time. Consolidation started for Ion Tiriac a few years ago, when he says he sold everything he had in the US and France to focus on Romania, because he could not have controlled his businesses otherwise. Now he is successfully sharing the control. ”I have high hopes for Ion Ion – thank God he has 8,300 people working for him and he is a down to earth person. The boy has an education: he went to college in the US, has an MBA from Irwin; as for me, what did I do, I was an athlete and went to college in Romania in the ‘60s?”
The crisis caught most people unprepared, the businessman believes, who congratulates himself that he prepared in good time and opened lines of credit to have access to money, and also saved something up. Otherwise, he would have had a really hard time, considering his fields of business. ”Cars? Real estate? Nothing sells anymore. Fortunately, I am not afraid, I saw the crisis coming and I have enough cash to swallow the pill; the crisis does cost me money, but I can survive without having to sell an apartment; I can’t sell the 4,000 euro/sqm ones, and I can’t sell the other – 1,000 euro/sqm ones, either.”
As for his tennis tournament in Madrid, in 2002, when he first organised it, Ion Tiriac had to come up with three million euros. He regarded it as an investment instead of a loss. The following year, he came up with one million. He broke even in the third and starting making profit in the fourth. ”After three years, this tournament became the most important social event in Madrid: there is not one important person who wouldn’t get a box at Madrid Open,” Tiriac says. Though he did not sell all the tickets, Ion Tiriac is optimistic, because his system will start generating more money in just a few years.