Ana Dumitrache, Managing Director of CTP Romania: “I think there will be growth, but moderate, and it’s definitely not going to be exploding.”
Daniel Cautis, Managing Partner of Dunwell Industrial Brokerage, and moderator of the Logistics Panel held at CEDER 2023 shared a very optimistic view over the growth that the development of the Romanian highway infrastructure would determine in the upcoming years.
His fellow panelist, Ana Dumitrache, was less impressed: “What growth?”, she said. “We have like 200,000 square meters in construction sites. But […] we’ve been slowing down. We were supposed to build 500,000, and the others are not building. […] We’re doing permitting. We have 3 million square meters of land bank. We’re trying to get permits for everything.”
Gijs Klomp, Business Development Manager at WDP, was also reserved as to the growth on the market, mentioning a period of price discovery, as well as a tendency towards cost-reduction amongst clients: “They have the higher utility costs, they have the rent that is coming up, they have higher labour costs, […] so, they’re optimizing designs. […] They try to squeeze more manufacturing equipment in the same box in order to be more productive and to have better unit costs.” On a positive but cautious note, he added: “All of us have had requirements from companies that are thinking to move production to Romania, or to increase their footprint in Romania, […] this is net addition to the market. But we have to be very disciplined.”
To complement these views, Șerban Juverdeanu, Head of Development at GlobalVision, said, referring to the shift of interest of foreign investors from the West to the East, that investors “still need continuity in infrastructure, they still need to understand in much more detail what are the options of employment there, what would be the incentives given by the state authority and the local authorities, which are frequently some of the reasons [for which] Romania is losing business.”
