Blidar hires 200 people for Arad tram factory

Businessman Valer Blidar, owner of Astra Vagoane Calatori
company, is set to hire 200 people at the Arad factory in autumn,
to the end of starting tram production. “We’ve prepared the factory
to start producing the tram prototype in July. Investments in
bringing assembly lines from Germany and space modernisation
amounted to almost 6m euros,” stated Blidar industrialist, who has
managed to build up a group of companies with revenues worth
several tens of million euros in passenger carriage production, and
who has recently entered the tram market, with a potential of 2.5bn
euros, the equivalent of 1,000 trams. On the market, the average
price of a tram stands at 2.5m euros. Blidar last year sealed a
partnership with Germany’s Siemens rolling stock producer, with a
view to manufacturing a tram model to be called Imperio. “At
present, we’re working with 40 specialists, but starting November
we’ll hire 200 people. We need 400 people to manufacture 35-40
trams per year,” Blidar said.