Ariadna Avram ten years ago created Top Diagnostics, a firm distributing diagnostic equipment for labs, and from a business employing seven people at that time, she has recently agreed to sell part of the company for "several tens of millions of euros" to Swiss giant Roche, whose products it distributed domestically.
Roche only took over the assets related to its business, as Top Diagnostics worked with other companies, as well.
"Roche had two options for transferring the business to choose from. Either we split into two companies and they bought one of them, or they chose to buy assets and transfer contracts and people," Avram explained.
The Swiss company chose the second option and as a result around 30 people of Top Diagnostics' team of 79 full-time employees will start working for Roche. It will have to recruit further to hit its target of 60 employees for the diagnostics unit.
Top Diagnostics in 2007 reached 21.8m-euro turnover and net income standing at 5m euros.
The story of Top Diagnostics starts back in 1998, when Avram, now 44, set up the company after having had her first contact with Roche in 1994. She then worked for Boehringer Mannheim, a group Roche acquired in 1997. Roche and Boehringer Mannheim each had a distributor, but wanted to merge their operations into a single distribution company. The emergence of Top Diagnostics solved this issue, but also led to the closing of Roche Diagnostics' office in Romania, which is due to be reopened in 2009 as a limited liability company.
Avram specifies she did not think of selling to Roche from the beginning, but the idea came to her "seeing what's happening in other neighbouring countries where Roche is present".
Avram, a biochemist, is considering investing in research now. "There are large medical research funds from the European Commission for genetic research. We're also considering a genetic investigations lab," Avram says.
The sale of part of the business also entails a turnover drop, hard to amortise. "There will be a turnover decrease we can hardly estimate. (...) As for sales, we have a target of at least 6m euros," Avram said.
Ariadna Avram owns 95% in Top Diagnostics, with the rest belonging to Felicia Pascu.
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