Market of web design services flat at below 2m euros

The Romanian web design market last year reached a value of over 1.5 million euros, Stefan Liute, strategy manager with Grapefruit, a company specialising in corporate identity services, branding and websites, told ZF.
Flaviu Radulescu, research manager with Hostway Labs Romania, puts the market at about the same value.
However, both believe the market is going to stagnate this year or witness slight growth. “This is only natural, considering most major companies already had their own websites built. Moreover, there are very many experienced or non-experienced young people that beat companies with large portfolios to projects,” explained Radulescu.
“The market tends to grow in terms of quality and I am confident more talent will become available, either in the case of freelancers, or within companies operating domestically,” said Liute.
The largest projects carried out on the Romanian market amounted to 100,000-200,000 euros. They were very rare projects, taking long periods of time to complete, according to Radulescu.
Most medium and large projects on the market have a value ranging between 5 and 15,000 euros. Liute and Radulescu consider the average value of projects is going to decline in time. Prices are set by the market and customers have a large supply they can choose from. This is the very reason why companies operating in the web design field must focus on consulting and strategy, considers Liute.
“Web page coding has become a generic commodity anyone can offer at an satisfactory quality,” specified Liute.
As a matter of fact, Grapefruit has already started outsourcing web page coding in some projects, and Liute believes this will become a general trend on the market.
Grapefruit last year posted turnover worth 300,000 euros and Liute expects this year’s figure to advance to more than 350,000 euros. Approximately 50-70% of revenues are generated by non-interactive services, unrelated to the Internet, with the rest being derived from web design.
“At this moment, we are not actively looking for investors that should partially or entirely acquire our company, but bids keep coming up. However, we are not ruling out a future sale when receive a satisfying bid both financially and in terms of the future of the company,” explains Liute.
In March, the company opened an office in Bucharest. “The rising number of customers in Bucharest and the ever growing complexity of the projects we are handling together with them have rendered our permanent presence here as necessary,” said Liute. He specified a direct contact with customers is necessary when it comes to strategy and consulting, which is not the case with web design.