American industrial giant Honeywell, which posts annual turnover worth $22 billion, has established an Engineering Centre in Bucharest. This centre, which will employ 25 engineers by yearend, will come up with automation solutions for the U.S. group's plants in Eastern Europe.
Honeywell's decision to set up an engineering division in Romania, whose employees will design industrial software (namely solutions that will be applied in all of the company's CEE divisions) proves that the Romanian economy can indeed use ideas to grow, as well.
Practically, the Americans are shifting from "manufacturing" to "thinking" in Romania, the exact same strategy that has propelled the United States economy to record-high productivity levels in the past twenty years, leaving the Europeans behind.
"The engineers (that will be hired by Honeywell in Bucharest i.e.) will create solutions that will lead to an improved automation of the company's industrial plants on the Eastern European markets," the American corporation's officials say.
Honeywell already operates on the Romanian market, where it manufactures components, subassemblies and turboblowers for the automotive industry and sells equipment. The group's Romanian-based branch accounts for less than 1% of the global turnover, namely less than 220 million dollars annually.
Another powerful industrial group, Germany's Siemens, has said early this year that it will double the numbers of its Romanian software engineers, who work for the Timisoara-based Siemens VDO Romania. Consequently, there will be 1,000 Romanian software engineers working for Siemens, instead of the existing 500.
The Romanian engineers and software professionals, who are highly-qualified and whose work is much cheaper than that of their Western European colleagues, are now being chased by the world's industrial giants, which used to be the main destinations for the Romanian IT professionals.
The Romanian economists are also concerned with this issue. This week has seen the publication of two works that put the Romanian economy under the magnifying glass, in the context of the Lisbon strategy. The two analyses have been drafted by the Romanian Economic Society and the Romanian Centre for Economic Policies (CRPE).
The above-mentioned strategy was launched in 2000 and aims that, by 2010, the EU economy should become the world's most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy. The main instrument quoted in the strategy is an increase in the research and development spending, up to 3% of the Gross Domestic Product, joined by the strong commitment of the private sector, which should bear about two thirds of these expenses.
According to these works, which were funded with European Union money, Romania should do more for research and development, but things are not that bad. Thus, more money should be invested in R&D, but Romania has good parameters in terms of technical knowledge. adrian.mirsanu@zf.ro
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