Dacia and Nokia account for 20% of export growth in the first nine months

Exports picked up speed unexpectedly in September, going up by 35% to an all-time high of 3.5 billion euros. A number of 17,500 employees of Dacia and Nokia alone generated one fifth of the export growth nine months into the year, which stood at 25%.
Exports picked up speed in September driven by demand from abroad, especially on the automotive segment, and reached a peak of 35%, compared with the same month of last year.
The Dacia cars made in Pitești and the Nokia phones made in Cluj were this year’s stars, with a significant contribution to export rebound. Both Renault and Nokia bet a lot on foreign markets and thus managed to maintain growth at a time when the Romanian economy was in recession. The problem is that Dacia has 13,500 employees and Nokia 4,000, while they pay an average of 300-euro wage, therefore the annual wages amount to several tens of millions of euros and are not enough to help consumer spending reboot.
The two generate about 11% of Romania’s exports and contributed almost one fifth (910 million euros) of the export increase from 21.4 billion euros in the first nine months of 2009 to 26.8 billion euros in the same time in 2010.