BR 15 years: The first fifteen

The fifteen-year anniversary of Business Review, which we are marking with this issue, was an editorial opportunity to reflect not only on how the magazine’s coverage has developed since it first began addressing the local business community, but also on the deal makers and events that have so far made an impact in Romania.

Even though this is a fifteen-year celebration, we chose to focus more on the past five years, because the period from 2008 onwards has been a trying one for local and international businesses alike. The economic downturn took its toll on many companies and, for the first time in Romania’s post-transition history, managers and entrepreneurs were faced with having to operate in an environment where overall growth was no longer pushing firms ahead, thus leaving room for a whole new set of challenges to facing players.

We started by reviewing five years of BR headlines to discover some of the events and businesses that made an impact, from the high-profile 2008 NATO summit held in Romania, through the peak pessimism of 2010, to the turmoil of last year’s political events.

We follow that with the ‘what went up, what went down’ section, which looks at several sectors of the Romanian economy to evaluate their performance over the past five years and to see what industries have expanded their number of consumers, attracted more investor interest or are developing at impressive rates, as has been the case with the renewable energy sector and the e-commerce segment.

The ‘changing consumer’ feature highlights the trends that are shaping or underlining the behavior of Romanian consumers, stemming either from more reserved spending habits against the background of the economic downturn, the adoption of new technology, or alignments to EU market level standards.

A separate feature is dedicated to profiling the Romanian entrepreneur, since so many developments in the local economy have come from individual initiatives and, as we discover in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, for the first time between 2007 and 2011, the early-stage entrepreneurial activity rate in Romania was higher that those in other CEE countries.

Finally, the ‘changing face of Bucharest’ section highlights the latest developments in the capital city’s landscape, architecture and urban planning.

We hope you will enjoy what we have put together for this week’s edition and continue to refer to Business Review for quality and relevant coverage of developments in the local business community.

Simona Fodor