Lucian Enaru (Schneider Electric Romania): Turning the energy crisis into an opportunity

Lucian Enaru, country manager at Schneider Electric Romania, Republic of Moldova, and Armenia, has been with the company for almost 18 years, so it is like a second family to him. He took the helm of the Romanian subsidiary just before the pandemic started, and the greatest source of satisfaction for him was the way people responded and came together in times of uncertainty and crisis.

By Anda Sebesi

2022 was marked by great achievements for Schneider Electric, which celebrated 25 years of operation on the Romanian market. This anniversary was a good opportunity for the company to review its long-term performance and set forth new ambitions for the years to come.

“I have built my career at Schneider Electric—an organisation I have been working with for almost 18 years—so I do enjoy working with my colleagues and doing my best to help them achieve their goals, be they professional or personal,” says Lucian Enaru. He suggests that his leadership style can be best described as participative and transformational. “The field in which we operate—power management—is by definition the backbone of sustainability and digital transformation, so evolving is something we do on a regular basis and that we encourage others to do as well.”

The digital revolution that took place across the electricity industry has resulted in the adoption of many new technologies and an exponential increase in data storage and processing needs. “At Schneider Electric, we call that Electricity 4.0. By harnessing these new technologies and cutting waste, we are able to reduce the consumption of the top 5 most energy-intensive industries by 13-29 percent, and this is applicable anywhere in the world, including Romania,” Enaru explains. He adds that this new offering has drawn the attention of the company’s clients and that it is leveraging the solution to support them in their mission to offset their ever-increasing utilities costs.

Last year, the company completed some major projects for its clients, assisted in the construction and equipment endowment of Romania’s first donation-funded children’s hospital—the National Children’s Hospital for Cancer, Serious Illness, and Trauma—and consolidated its market leading position on several business segments, from both the consumer and corporate markets. “We also resumed our trainings and meetings with our distribution and integration partners, and we were glad to contribute to the professional development of their employees, to meet our global standards of performance. We assisted Automatica in obtaining its Schneider Electric license, and as a result we now have a valuable local partner with longstanding experience on the market, and this is just one of many such examples,” Enaru says.

And while 2022 was a fruitful year for Schneider Electric, Enaru points out that the single most important challenge the company faced last year was the energy-related situation generated by the military conflict in Ukraine. “However, given our core business, the energy crisis also provided several solid opportunities for us, as companies reconsidered and accelerated their sustainability and energy efficiency plans from this new perspective. Utilities are recurring costs and keeping energy costs under control has been and will continue to be essential for business viability and continuity.”’