Tomasz Wolanowski became ABB Country Manager for Romania & Moldova last autumn. Wolanowski finds Romania surprisingly beautiful, while it has a lot of similarities with Poland. But while Romania was hit hard by the crisis, Poland enjoyed a smoother period during 2008 and 2013, as it implemented the economic reform earlier. And there’s still much to do in the local strategy, infrastructure and resource planning, he says, in an exclusive interview for energynomics.ro.
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What are the challenges of your new position as a country manager for ABB in Romania? How did you receive the proposal to come to Romania?
I started my career with ABB in 1994 and then I occupied different positions mainly in sales, but in the last six years I was responsible for ABB sales in Poland for the power products division, for all products above 1 KV, and after that I was coordinating the sales activities on country level for all ABB businesses.
This is my first international assignment for ABB, besides a short 6 months experience in Sweden in 1996.
In ABB, like in many companies today, international experience is well perceived, and that’s why I came to Romania, to have this experience, and look beside my home country where I spent my professional life.
I moved to Romania in October 2013, while my family moved here starting February.
The first task I have to perform here is to get to know the market and the country well. I tried to understand the structure of the energy sector and main players in the industry, then about our sales channels, customers, competitors, how to approach the market. Also, at the operational level, the biggest challenge was and still is the cash collection. We have still quite relatively high level of overdues from our third party customers, and I think this is the general challenge for the country. I attended several seminars not only in our field, but about the banking sector as well, and I think this is the main challenge for Romania. I believe that in order to improve the situation, there must be a change of legislation, and also the implementing of best practices by the companies controlled by the government.
We still see the situations where state-owned companies don’t pay on time, the project contract is executed, and then there’s a delay in payment…
How about the mid-term perspective?
For the mid-term perspective, I think it’s nice that we see Romania has a lot of GDP growth.
