Paradoxically, Gabriel Marin, Omnilogic manager, describes the evolution of his company as "unnatural," as it has come to gain too large a market share. Marin, an economist, says the success of his company is due to a rather unusual factor: "We are the only IT company in Romania not run by a technician."
With a touch of humour in his voice, Marin explains he understood a simple thing from the very beginning, a thing that eluded other managers: to succeed, any manager has to engage in a pursuit of profit and forget about pride.
Established in 1992 by Gabriel Marin and three other associates and after a time of "wandering about" in the private sector, which he would rather not talk about, the limited liability company Omnilogic has had one pretty clearly defined goal every since the beginning.
"Our concept was assembled goods. We have never assembled them ourselves," Marin says. "We chose to walk on the brand (name) side."
The first partners Omnilogic contacted were Novell, Western Digital, Microsoft, SMC and Digital Synoptics, later to be joined by Cisco Systems, Corel, Nortel Networks, IBM, Lucent or Compaq.
At the same time, the company consolidated a distribution network, which now consists in 800 partners throughout the country.
For two years in row, that is 1999 and 2000, Omnilogic managed to sell the most Compaq products, winning the Top Performance in Revenue Award for sales from Compaq.
"We sold $8.8 million in Compaq products in 1999, while 2000 sales increased to $14 million," Marin says. Omnilogic's sales of Compaq products accounted for about 60% of Compaq's indirect sales, of a $25 million total.
Cisco Systems product sales were also good, so that Omnilogic became its regional partner for Bulgaria, Moldavia and Ukraine. It successfully sold more than 25% of the Xerox products in Romania, as well.
"We have a rather aggressive sales policy and maybe that's why competition is not too keen on us," Marin says. "All we usually had to do was engage on a new line of business and in a year we would gain about 60% of the market in question."
In late 2000, the company had $40 million in turnover, compared with $29 million in 1999 or $7.3 million in 1993, when the business was established.
"We managed to attain this turnover in 2000 with only 28 employees, but our internal investments amounted to some $500,000," Marin explains. "We are planning to double our turnover by 2003 without hiring more than five or six people."
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