Stealthily, behind plush doors or in upscale restaurants, there are people in Romania concocting transactions worth tens of millions of dollars. The “cable guys.” People who were most adept in sensing the winds of profit after 1990.
Remember the forest of aerials stretching on the roof of every apartment bloc ten years ago? Or the envy people felt for satellite dish owners? I don’t think so. To receive just ten television channels now is a disgrace, and babies find themselves clicking through channels before they actually learn to walk.
First, a handful of apartment blocs were hooked to immense satellite dishes. Minimum investments: a dish, a transmitter, several hundreds of feet of cable, a drill, a few screws and a tech support line. Gradually, on an uncommonly competition-driven market, especially in the big cities, the strong swallow the weak. And now the strong are selling themselves to the stronger, from Europe or the United States, for tens of millions of dollars. Interest for this market has become enormous, and the business is not measured in assets – feet of cable or other investments – but merely in the subscriber pool, and the demand that comes with it.
About the same time, perhaps a little later, the “mobile phone guys” came in. Here the business took a different turn, but with the same success. Entry on the market cost a lot of money, but the big sharks answered the call with millions of dollars in investments, which now are worth billions.
Poor but talkative and dreading loneliness, Romanians sank their teeth into cellular phones and TV channels more than any other nation in Central and East Europe.
It is only apparently a paradox. In a country with 40% of the labour force engaged in agriculture, where the masses of “workers” in industrial areas still dominate the big cities, where only a quarter of the share capital is in private hands, there are so many people watching television, talking on the cell phone, travelling and drinking increasing amounts of beer.
Television, mobile phones, beer, cars, Internet. These are lucrative businesses. They have a market. There are people willing to buy, as there are investors willing to contribute money.
This is one face of the economy. On the other are the mounts of scrap iron. You can see them alongside the road. Deserted silos. Leaning trucks. Immense industrial halls. Money down the drain. Who’s going to buy them? Buy what? Maybe debt.
The State Ownership Fund is struggling to sell industrial mammoths for scanty prices. Tractorul, Roman, steel works, strategic refineries, ten-company packages for which foreign consultants are seeking buyers with foreign money, the “cream” of the Romanian industry is perhaps worth less than the two largest mobile phone companies.
The Romanian transition signalled the start for a race between parts of the society and the economy that travel at increasingly different speeds. On one end, there is the Internet, mobile phones, information, speed, action. On the other, inertia, misinformation, fear of change.
Business prowess does not belong to those who own something – machines, lathes or computers – but to those who sell. This is what the cable guys understood first. That they had something that sells, though not tangible. Nothing to grab and put in your pocket. A smile, an emotion, an enthusiastic announcement. You buy them, get used to them, and you can’t contemplate living without them.