A solid economy one in which entrepreneurs develop strong businesses that they pass on to future generations. This can be easily seen in western European countries or in the United States.
Over there, we find entrepreneurial businesses which are decades or even over a hundred years old, with a global presence and turnovers of tens of billions of euros or dollars. We still can’t talk about anything like that here.
That’s because we’ve only had 30 years of market economics. In the three decades that have passed since the Revolution, we have also seen so-called entrepreneurs who were claimed to be rescuers of state-owned enterprises, many of which were destroyed overnight. Their businesses did not last and disappeared from the domestic landscape, but those that were started by the true entrepreneurs based on hard work did survive.
This is why today we have examples of businesses started in the 1990s or even after 2000 that currently have turnovers of hundreds of millions and thousands of employees. These are the ones who take the risks, make the investments, provide jobs and pay their taxes. They should be encouraged, not sabotaged by the authorities’ overzealous actions.
Moreover, they must be promoted and helped to enter new markets whenever possible, to export Romanian goods and services and thus bring money into the country. At the same time, they can be real role models for young people who want to explore their entrepreneurial spirit.
Only this way can our economy prosper and become a force, at least in the region. Through this yearly Top 100, we are working towards the goal of showing the beautiful part of the Romanian business world, the inspiring entrepreneurial stories and the people who lifted the economy off the ground. We are sure that if we can learn to recognise their merits, we can hope to have more world-class Romanian companies competing with Bosch, Apple, Google or Microsoft over the next 30 years.
