Cold weather causes Apicom business to shrink 3%

The business of Apicom, a company based in Harghita county, which builds wooden houses and sells construction materials, dropped 3% in the first eight months of 2006 due to weather conditions at the beginning of the year, with the local purchasing power being similar to that seen in the previous year. “Turnover dropped by 200,000 euros in the first eight months of the year, to 6.68 million euros due to the prolonged winter season, the delays in funding, the price increase and the stagnation of the domestic purchasing power,” stated Moldov?n Reinitz J?zsef, deputy general manager of the company. Apicom posted a turnover worth 10 million euros and a profit of 300,000 euros in 2005. The company in Harghita builds wooden houses for use as permanent or holiday residences, with some 70% of the production going to export, to states of the European Union such as Italy, France, Hungary, Austria or Denmark. Apicom, which handles processing and production as well as assembling and selling, has built approximately 80 houses this year, with an average surface area of 100 square metres, most of them made of solid wood. Almost 60 of them have reached European Union markets.