BusinessMagazin

Tag: Bucharest

  • The Owner Is Waiting

    It is Tuesday evening and, for the first time in days, it appears it will not rain in Bucharest. This, of course, makes waiters in bars and restaurants in Bucharest’s old town happy. Now, they are busy waiting on clients, who have filled all the outdoor restaurants, although it is not a weekend.

    ”Who do I ask for a drink around here?,” asks a young woman who has just joined acquaintances at a table. ”Me,” says a guy at the table, getting up and stepping into the bar. ”I didn’t know he was a waiter here,” says the young woman, and the explanation comes promptly from another person at the table: ”He doesn’t just wait tables here, he owns the bar with a few of his friends.” The four friends knew one another beforehand – their common passion for motorcycles in fact brought them together.

    ”One spring day we were passing by in the street and we sensed there was money to be made here. So we decided we would set up a motorcycle bar,” recounts Giani Manta (35), one of the four owners of the Jaya Café, which opened in mid-May on Smardan Street. Although none of them had previously had any experience in the field, the decision was very easy to make. ”I had just come back after eight months in Tibet. I went there to recover after 11 years of corporate grind,” says Emil Spataru (35), referring to the time he spent working for the formerly state-held operator Romtelecom.

    He is the only one who was an employee before; Giani Manta has a constructions company and a clothing store, and Mihai Sorin, another shareholder, has a real estate agency. It is not uncommon for bar or restaurant owners in the old centre to moonlight as waiters. The number of places has more than doubled compared with last year, with over 50 bars and restaurants located in the area. Further openings are expected before the cold weather sets in. ”We are hoping to make new openings by the end of the summer,” says Vasi Andreica, developer of the two Coffee Store coffee shops and importer of Moak coffee in Romania.

  • Remember APACA?

    The first signs of capitalism greet you right at the old gate of the former factory on 7, Iuliu Maniu Boulevard. On one side, tens of posters hastily thrown together and randomly stuck on the walls announcing the existence of all sorts of firms, from apparel to electronics shops, laundries, fitness studios, print shops and more. On the other, a new building, still under construction, sticks out like a sore thumb among the old buildings on the premises. A large billboard next to it advertises that this is where a new shop of one of the few clothing makers still operating in APACA, the biggest and best-known ready to wear factory in the communist years, will be built.

     

    Since 1992, the year APACA was privatised, all the production facilities have been sold one by one and turned into different businesses. The ten ready to wear factories on the site were therefore much easier to divide among the hundreds of new shareholders, the former employees of APACA. The MEBO-type privatisation was the start of a real entrepreneurial aptitude test for the new shareholders. Until privatisation, the orders came from the state and were forwarded to divisions, but since 1992 each new owner has been on his own. It was very difficult because few of the APACA employees had had any contact with the foreign customers of the factory before, because neither the money nor the negotiations would reach the production facility.

     

    That was also the case of Alexandru Ciucu Sr., who at the time took over section 5 that he was running, which made men’s clothes. The business was built together with his son, Alexandru Ciucu Jr. “At first we only worked under contract – exclusively to order, with materials supplied by customers, for Hugo Boss, Stefanel, Steilmann, YSL, H&M, but in time our friends started to ask for a suit and this is how we realised the potential of the domestic market,” Ciucu Jr, recalls.

     

    Over time, other businesses came to the site, which had no connection to the APACA of yore. The site does not have a manager, however, so that there is no clear record of the companies operating on the nine hectares, and those who are curious to know have only posters, direction arrows and less often company logos to guide them to discover them: TipArt Vision print shop, Tara Fashion, Nordic Gym and so on.

    Normally, the real estate market became interested, but APACA is hard to get. Real estate market specialists say the situation of the former apparel complex is quite complicated and attempts to gain exclusive rights to APACA have failed.