40% decline, not bad at all

In his around 20 square-metre office, Enrico Perini appears to be a simple company executive: the simplicity of the office is quite striking, especially since, in order to get to the part of the building where it is located, you have to go through the AutoKlass showroom, which displays cars worth tens of thousands of euros each. Whilst in other companies, the head has the best-looking office, the Italian, whose business exceeded half a billion euros last year, has much more important things to do than to decorate his office. He appears to be down, no longer beaming with enthusiasm, like he did two years ago.

However, surprisingly, he is not very concerned about the sales decline, although this year’s forecasts point to a 40% sales decline against last year. In a time when all managers complain about sales, the Italian’s satisfaction (“results are acceptable”) is somewhat unexpected. But the mystery clears up: “the business remains profitable overall,” says Perini, who declines to provide further details. The company’s balance sheets indicate “pluses”, although the company has not operated redundancies, technically speaking; 80% of the 1,000 employees that have left the company did it on their own initiative, he says. “It’s true we have not hired new staff to replace those who left,” admits Perini. Now the group employs around 2,700 staff in nine companies, with the biggest volumes accounted for by Romstal Imex (thermal and hydro equipment and sanitary ware), Valrom Industrie (a manufacturer of plastic pipe systems), Valplast Industrie (a manufacturer of PVC tubes and fittings) and by car dealer AutoKlass Center.

Two years ago, the businessman was interested in expanding and boosting the business, but now his greatest concern is productivity – this is a word that comes up often in the discussion. He gives concrete examples of what he means: “A car seller in Italy is not profitable if it doesn’t sell 100 cars in our class per year” (Autoklass Center is a Mercedes Benz dealer). This compares with 30-35 cars sold per agent per year, less than in 2008. The car division recorded the biggest declines this year. However, Mercedes-Benz sales fell by 42% in the first half of this year, to 864 cars – the smallest decline of a premium car brand in Romania.