Soft32.com owner wants to develop instead of selling

Lucian Todea, owner of soft32.com, the second ranking site in terms of the number of visitors in Romania, as shown by Trafic.ro, and among the top Romanian websites in the world, says his purpose is to develop his business to the highest extent possible, and not to sell it.

Two years after it was launched, the site providing programmes, games and drivers for Windows, Mac, Linux and PDA, registers 4.2 million visitors per month, and its daily accessing generates 70% of the turnover derived by Sibiu-based ITNT firm.

The firm run by Todea (26) last year posted turnover close to 1 million euros and the target for this year is to double turnover.

Beside soft32.com, the company also owns scriptswave.com (which provides resources, tutorials, source codes and scripts for various programming languages, and has 350,000 visitors monthly), buy32.com (a site selling the entire range of products promoted by Amazon.com, with more than 250,000 visitors per month), BestMobile.ro and Gobuysoft.com (the latter two now being re-launched).

"For now, we do not plan to sell any of the sites we own. We believe we are very good at what we are doing and we have the power to grow these sites for a long time to come.

"This is why selling them at this moment is not an option. For the Romanian market, the next two years will see solid growth in terms of the number of Internet users and the number of web sites and their quality, as well as in terms of the budgets earmarked for online advertising. Regarding web sites, we believe one of the most dynamic types will be e-commerce sites," explained Todea.

He says the market he operates on is very large (practically, any person connected to the Internet needs a programme, a game or a driver at some point) and there''s enough room for of a large number of players.

"Since the Internet is a very dynamic market, it is really easy to rise very fast at some point, but if the same development pace is not found inside the company and in the short and medium-term development plans, it can have a boomerang effect," explains Todea.

To the very end of avoiding such an evolution, the manager of ITNT spends most of his time working for this business.

"Of course, there are several projects of the same type we are working at now. Time suffices, but the problem is finding the right people for the needs related to this type of online business. As it is a quite new domain in Romania, finding experienced persons is quite difficult," says Todea.

The idea of launching soft32.com site came to him while he was a student.

"As a student, I had enough spare time and with the emergence in 2002 of several Internet access offers, I bought a modem for the computer I had and started ''discovering'' the Internet", Todea recounts.