From business to politics and back

Liviu Nistoran, the 32 year-old general manager of GlobalNET-Avenir Telecom Romania, leader of the mobile telephony equipment and services distribution market, has an accomplished business career.

Three years ago, Nistoran joined the category of managers willing to pursue a career both in business and politics, in order to bring pragmatism into the decisions influencing the business environment.

Liviu Nistoran entered the business world in 1994 as soon as he graduated the Electro-Technical Faculty.

The sudden change was somewhat premeditated, since Nistoran had studied Economic Engineering, a field he found very interesting, as he considered it successfully combined economics with engineering.

The person who motivated and challenged him to enter the business field was his former financial management professor, who made him understand how the economy works and showed him the basics business management.

He started a small business by selling second hand PCs he used to bring from Netherlands and Germany. He borrowed money from other people in order to buy them, but he borrowed the first 500 dollars from his father.

He gradually realised he would better assemble the computers using spare parts bought from Romania. After one year he started to deal with PC assembly, sale and service together with his first employee, who was a former mate.

The business fared so well that he could afford to move the company’s head-office in a rented 5-room flat in 1996. He already had five employees and, as the volume of PC spare parts was high, he started to import them from the US, Austria and Taiwan, where they were cheaper. The company opened a store and entered the spare parts distribution.

When mobile telephony came, in 1997, Nistoran established GlobalNET, a company exclusively aimed at mobile telephony, together with several Romanian partners: “I founded the company following the usual pattern: in a small flat, with two employees and with an initial share capital worth 25,000 dollars. I started to import Nokia and Ericsson mobile phones, as I had already made connections with several European providers while I was doing business with computers. I simultaneously created a distribution network and I signed a service distribution contract with Connex in June 1997, while I started to import accessories for mobile phones,” Nistoran says.

At the end of that year, both the PC and the mobile phone companies registered a quite low turnover – about 1 million dollars each – but they were moving to different directions. As mobile telephony had better prospects, Nistoran focused on GlobalNET.

“There was a lot of competition and crowd on the PC market, which was shrinking. Besides, I did not have enough time to deal with the computer company, as GlobalNET was posting exponential growth and took much of my time,” Nistoran says.

By the end of 1997, the company was among the first three Connex distributors as for the number of sold subscriptions. During the same year, the company also opened the first store specialised in mobile telephony, downtown Bucharest.