Tyre importer Heuver Tyrecenter, the domestic arm of Dutch company Heuven Baden, this year banks on double turnover, after it reoriented its marketing policy towards supporting the marketing programmes of its partners and customers.
“We expect this campaign to boost our business by 130% this year due to the support of marketing and to the promotional campaigns we are carrying out,” says Roxana Havrici, Heuver”s commercial manager.
The bulk of the company”s turnover comes from tyre wholesale, namely 60%, with the difference derived from retail sales and operations carried on the segment of tyre servicing.
Transportation firms and tyre dealers are the most important customers of the company.
In the first nine months of this year, the company derived turnover worth 5.45 million RON (1.5 million euros), while its profit stood at 453,000 RON (125,000 euros). It logged turnover worth 3.45 million RON (852,000 euros) and profit worth 145,000 RON (36,000 euros) for the whole of 2004.
For 2005, Heuver management anticipates turnover will hit eight million RON (2.2 million euros).
“The Romanian market is seeing a definite development trend, gaining momentum from year to year. At the same time, the last two years have witnessed a surge in investments in the development of the company image, from investments in advertising, to the way companies are presented on the market,” stated Havrici.
In 2006, the company plans to open new branches in another three cities of Romania.
SCANDAL
The UN report on the “Oil for Food” programme does not incriminate Rompetrol, whose name is found next to another 2,200 companies on a table of companies that had additional payments for the contracts run, stated Rompetrol chairman Dinu Patriciu yesterday. “The company does not come up anywhere in this report. Rompetrol”s name is listed in two annexed tables, one of which showing companies that bought oil from Iraq and the other showing those that incurred additional expenses for running the contracts. There are 2,200 companies in this situation.” The annex (naming the companies that made illegal payments to the former Iraqi regime) of the UN report co-ordinated by Paul Volcker, former chairman of US” Federal Reserve, also lists Upetrom as having got the biggest service and equipment contract of all the Romanian companies on the list. Upetrom”s contract was worth 19.7 million dollars out of a total of about 36 million dollars. On the other hand, Foreign Minister Mihai-Razvan Ungureanu (photo) said that the official version of the report did not mention any Romanian company or Romanian citizen names. The only company mentioned, however, is Bulf Drilling and Oil Servicii that had branches in both Iraq and Romania. This name came up in connection with a transaction carried through US-based Texaco. The Economy and Trade Ministry will check to see if there were any state-run companies that participated in the “Oil for Food” programme and were involved in making illegal payments to the former Iraqi regime, Minister Codrut Seres told Mediafax yesterday.