The P&G factory, the construction of which started yesterday, will employ 150 people at first and half of the output will be delivered in the Balkan region.
"We intend to recruit extensively from the Urlati area, but we will also take engineers from Ploiesti and Bucharest. We already have ongoing programmes involving students from the technical faculties in these cities," said Daniel Myers, vice-president of Product Supply Global Hair Care of P&G.
In Urlati, a 12,000-people town, unemployment currently stands at 12%, according to the local authorities, which estimate the investment of Procter & Gamble will reduce this rate at 1-2%.
The second phase of the project could start in 2010, with several markets targeted including Ukraine, Russia and Turkey, Procter & Gamble officials said.
The investment the consumer goods producer will make in the town of Prahova County has also attracted a greenfield project from one of the main suppliers of packaging for P&G, US-based Plastipack company. The group is in talks with the local authorities to lease a six-hectare plot of land in Urlati. Both P&G and Plastipack will be located on the extension of the Ploiesti Industrial Park in Urlati.
The 50 million-euro investment of the P&G giant in Romania comes at a difficult time for the international economy, when the major, already mature markets in Europe have seen a significant decline in the sales of consumer goods. Many companies have postponed their projects to invest in boosting production capacity, as a result of the lack of financing.
"Nobody anticipated the extent of the economic decline worldwide. We are moving ahead with the investment in Urlati, first of all because this project was devised to be a long-term one and second because P&G is a very healthy company financially: we will invest 1.5 billion dollars in production this year alone," Daniel Myers stated.
In 2008, several multinationals in the consumer goods industry, among which Colgate Palmolive, Kraft and Nestle, decided to close their production centres in Romania and move their facilities to other Eastern countries. As far as the former two multinationals are concerned, closing their factories in Brasov also means ceasing all manufacturing operations in Romania, while Nestle decided to relocate only the ice-cream factory near Bucharest and kept the facility in Timisoara.
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