Urdareanu, UTI: The future of capitalism lies in creativity

Tiberiu Urdareanu, founder of UTI group, with 154m-euro turnover and over 1,500 employees, states the future capitalists will be the creative ones, set to generate turnovers of hundreds of million euros “with three laptops”.
Urdareanu, 56, a former employee at the Defence Ministry before ’89, states the principles of capitalism have been forgotten in the past years, but that the current global crisis will bring back to the spotlight the conditions for the development of a business: profit reinvestment and careful money spending.
“(…) Now, with three laptops and five brains one can set up a corporation because development will be based on creativity,” believes Urdareanu, who took to doing business in 1990, first by selling computers, in high demand at that time.
He considers that the exclusively consumption-based development of the economy has led to major slippages.
UTI is a major provider of IT solutions and security on the domestic market, a Romanian-held company, the one that created Bucharest’s traffic management system and introduced the automated taxation system in Bucharest’s buses.
Urdareanu in 1990 set up Infcon lucrative association, with three shareholders, who contributed three wages at the share capital. Infcon’s first office was Urdareanu family’s house and they subsequently rented out a location, when the business expanded. ” (…) Foreign firms started spotting domestic market opportunities and we couldn’t fight the large players and hence we changed direction by chance (…)” Alarm systems imported from Israel coincided with the respective direction change.
Infcon subsequently also started installing security systems.
The association was then turned into a limited liability company under the UTI brand, and Urdareanu became the company’s sole shareholder.
In 1998 Urdareanu shifted to engineering and project management. Now, despite the crisis, the business is less hurt as it is more diversified. Still, the group’s turnover will drop by around 22% this year, to 125m euros, while the operating income will rise.