Xerox Romania expects double digit growth this year

Xerox estimates that it will post double digit local growth this year, according to Gabriel Pantelimon, GM of Xerox Romania and the Republic of Moldova, who added that he expects the company to post growth in all segments.

“In the first quarter of the year, we started very well with growth in all segments. The market burst out and clients started acquiring what they had not been able to over the past years. In the second quarter, things calmed down a bit,” said Pantelimon.
Sales of hardware equipment slumped by 65 percent on the Romanian market in 2009.”Our business is generally in line with market trends. The bright side was that we had a strategy on the segment of services that helped us weather the crisis,’ he said.
Xerox intends to improve its network of partners. Pantelimon explains to BR how the company works with clients. “When dealing with large companies, we have a team of five direct consultants, each of them in charge with an industry. In this way, we cover approximately 200 large clients in industries such as telecom, finances (banks and insurances), manufacturing, utilities. We also have a consultant for the public sector and a consultant for the graphic art segment,” says Pantelimon. 
Additionally, Xerox also has 24 strategic partners for medium sized enterprises, who have a footprint all over the country.
“Last but not least, there is the market of small clients whom we approach via five distributors who are direct importers and have a network of resellers selling smaller equipment. The resellers are not in direct contract with Xerox, only with the distributors. There are probably 1,000 resellers at this point, even more” explains Pantelimon.
At the moment, there are in total 240 employees of Xerox in Romania. 70 work in the company’s offices while the remaining 170 work at the customers’ headquarters.
There are over 25 people working in the Xerox scanning and archiving center in Bucharest, which caters for local and international clients (usually multinational companies from Western Europe).
“As the number of contracts increases, we will need more capacity, which means both hardware/software but also more people. With every new contract, you may need more people,” says Pantelimon. 
Eligible employees in this center are generally foreign language students who also need to have certain computer skills.
According to Pantelimon, Romania is a market with a great deal of potential. Some services that are available in the United States are still not available in Romania, but he expects will be introduced soon. Among these, he mentioned services for administering car traffic.
“Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), the company that Xerox took over in the US, has been offering this service for a lot of years. In Romania, these services have not arrived yet, even though we believe there is need for them. We expect that starting next year we will be able to offer these services in Romanian also,” Pantelimon tells BR.
“In Romania, we do not offer services for human resources processes. In the United States, ACS and even Xerox offer services such as payroll processing. There are many services that companies outsource generally and Xerox is offering such services in other countries. Another example would be services for the financial department such as the collection of payments from clients. In the BPO area, any business process that does not represent the client’s core business can be outsourced. ACS offers these in the US and in Romania they are not yet offered,” he concludes.

Otilia Haraga