Keeping the bearings rolling

With the largest share of Romanian bearings exported worldwide, Turkish URB Group has turned the Barlad plant into one of the main domestic industrial powerhouses. Esin Ugurtay, business development director of URB Group, tells BR the company is grappling with an influx of counterfeit bearings.

By Ovidiu Posirca

What kind of support do you expect from the government?

Unfortunately, in Romania there is still no regulation for the standards of bearing you can import. Romania has always been the center of the bearing industry, but legally it doesn’t have any standards. Bearings that are made in China are made from low-quality material, which is really risky for the end users and threatens their safety; such products can easily be imported into Romania. We are looking for some protection for the bearing industry and the legitimate bearing producers. If you do not protect your industry with some legal standards, we can’t protect you.

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In Romania, there are some fake URB bearing producers whom we are fighting in court. For example, in India 70 percent of the URB bearings sold in the market are fake. They delete the URB brand and write another German brand on it. Many producers are making the Chinese fake URB bearings that we are fighting against.

How did bearings demand in Romania fare last year?

We are expecting the market to exceed EUR 10 million in Romania, but unfortunately, since 2008 – when the global crisis started – we have been affected in the internal market. This year we have decided to go to industries on a city-by-city basis, near the customers to explain the opportunity to the purchasing managers and engineers. In the next three years our expectation is to match the 2008 level of over EUR 10 million.

What is the value of the bearings market?

Right now the legitimate bearings market is EUR 100 million. We are looking to reach a 10 percent market share and we can exceed that.

What is the feedback from the authorities?

Unfortunately, they look only at the price ratio. You can’t compare URB and Chinese prices.  You can buy a bearing you can use for 60 days on one application for USD 1 or bearings that you can use for ten years for USD 30.

Have you continued to invest in Barlad?

In the last two years we have made over EUR 10 million of investments and in the next ten years we plan to make another USD 50 million in investments.

What are the main export growth markets you’re targeting this year?

We are looking at Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia and Australia. We are also looking to further develop the market in Russia. Generally, of whatever we are supplying to our customers, approximately 90 percent of the total package is from Romania. The remaining ten percent we supply from our plants in Hungary and Turkey.

ovidiu.posirca@business-review.ro