The Romanian retail market has attracted increasingly more international groups in the past few years. In an attempt to beat the competition, Romanian companies have found a way to compensate for their lack of experience: they recruited foreign managers.
Univers'all domestic supermarket chain, held by GFS group, has a new general manager, French-born Patrick Iffly, who used to be the chief of operations from Hiproma, the company that brought the Carrefour hypermarkets in Romania. "Supermarkets have been gaining more ground across Europe lately and I think the same thing will happen on the Romanian market. I could have returned to France or gone to another country, but, after I spent four years working on the Romanian market, I realised there was great potential and I decided to stay," says 40 year-old Patrick Iffly, whose entire professional career was spent in the field of commerce.
Negotiations with Iffly took "a great deal of time," according to Razvan Petrovici, general manager of GFS group. However, by attracting the French manager, Petrovici claims to have made up for the lack of know-how, which usually prevents Romanian networks from successfully fighting against the international retail networks.
"I worked for various France-based hypermarket types, from the small ones, spreading on 4,000 square metres, to stores taking up 20,000 square metres. I had never worked for a supermarket network before, but Univers'all stores are close to the small-sized hypermarkets (i.e. the space for sales usually tops 3,200 square metres)," Iffly added.
GFS group, which operates in distribution and trade, estimates to post $100 million in turnover this year, up from $70 million in 2003.
ionut.bonoiu@zf.ro
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