Dan Zaharia, senior leasing consultant, EXTIND Management: Outsourcing in the successful regional cities of Romania
Once with the opening of its Iasi-based IT Informal School and the newly opened office of RoGBC Moldova, EXTIND Management aligns the green building offer in the region to the needs of international corporate clients, by adopting the Polish model that also includes the state aid component, lacking in Romania in previous years.
„A fact is that in spite of the general opinion that Iasi and the northern part of Romania is poorly developed at the European level, the region holds significant resources for business development and investments,” said Dan Zaharia, senior leasing consultant at EXTIND Management.
„The competition is not formed within the country; Cluj or Timisoara are not competition for Iasi, as each has different competences. Instead, the stakeholders’ focus should be targeting markets such as Morocco, Guatemala, Vietnam. Bucharest is a saturated market in terms of business development and many companies present in the capital are opening subsidiaries in other cities in Romania, in order to resist the salary spiral,” he added.
„There is certain subjectivity in terms of choosing a city for opening a business or expanding it, besides the concrete metric regarding people salaries, rents, and technical skills,” as Zaharia explained. Starting in 2007, Dan Zaharia, as „business ambassador” of Iasi, manages rental transactions for businesses in Iasi, also expanding the lobby endeavours to Cluj and Chisinau.
„For instance, Iasi alone delivers around 1,000 specialists pipeline, each coming from four relevant specialized faculties in Iasi, including the Faculty of Computer Sciences,” said Zaharia. „Both Cluj-Napoca and Iasi delivers proper conditions to IT and outsourcing investments, due to their strong academic environment, with over 70,000 students, the advanced telecom infrastructure and a continuous flux of IT specialists,” he concluded.
The whole article written by Alexandra Lopotaru and Magda Purice (The Diplomat) can be found here.