Vaillant sees sales down to half

Vaillant, one of the leading producers of heating systems in Europe, estimates sales of central heating systems on the Romanian market to halve this year, due to a similarly sharp decline of the entire market. This is due to the authorities’ determination to prevent people from cutting their homes off from the centralised heating system and by an uncertainty about what the future holds on the part of consumers.

The representatives of Germany’s Vaillant-Hepworth Group feel Romania is now at a crossroads; a decision on which heating system to pick needs to be based on a clear strategy and share a common denominator with the economy and with what the consumers want, as everywhere else in Europe.

Under the current circumstances on the domestic market, the German company’s short-term focus will be on training personnel to install its systems, on the service activities and on providing advice to end users about the new heating system technologies, says Christoph Grosser, Vaillant Romania country manager and chief executive of Perfectiune Service SRL, the local branch of the Vaillant-Hepworth Group.

At the same time, Vaillant’s Romanian operations will be going through a new phase in the near future, as the German company is now in advanced talks to buy one of its importers, Bucharest-based KGK. The move will mark Vaillant’s entry on the wholesale segment on the Romanian market. Its four brands are now sold by four separate importers: Hornoff Trading Consult (importer of Vaillant), Secpral Cluj Napoca (importer of wall-mount Protherm heating systems), KGK Bucharest (Saunier Duval), and Romstal (Hermann).

“We’re in talks over buying one of our four importers, which will take us one step closer to our clients,” said Dieter MA1ller, the group’s marketing director for Eastern Europe. Sources close to the talks later told Ziarul Financiar that KGK was the one that would be bought by yearend, with the deal revolving around 2 or 3 million euros. The quoted sources said the exclusive importer of the Saunier Duval brand in Romania had logged some 8 million euro turnover in 2003.