During the first meeting of the new mandate, FIC Board of Directors
re-elected the organization’s management team remaining consistent with
the same vision for economic sustainable development. Cristian Secoșan
continues a new mandate as FIC President, together with Vice Presidents
Ramona Jurubiță and Eric Stab, and Daniel Anghel as Treasurer. FIC will
continue to address strategic themes for the Romanian economy and
provide recommendations for medium and long-term measures aligned with
the European good practices, but at the same time, it is ready to
formulate position papers based on the expertise and practical
knowledge of experts from the member companies and to react in an agile
manner to the current challenges. The FIC Board of Directors maintains
on the agenda the fundamental themes for Romania’s development:
attracting investments, stability and predictability of the fiscal
regime, strengthening the resilience of the energy sector, implementing
sustainable measures in business plans, environmental protection,
ensuring the population’s welfare and health, technological
development, and implementing digital processes.
The normalization efforts imposed by the European Central Bank will
increasingly dissipate in 2023, before the effective monetary policy
rate reaches a neutral level. Apart from the increases generated by
energy prices, the supply chain bottlenecks and the geopolitical
uncertainty, growing risks of euro area fragmentation will affect the
ECB’s normalization plans. Given that the US Federal Reserve will have
more moderate growth ambitions in 2023, it will become harder for the
ECB to oppose the trend and stay on its normalization path. Therefore,
two key rate hikes are projected for 2023, both expected in the first
half of the year.
Private lending grew by 16.5% in May compared to the same period of
2021, the total balance having reached RON 345.2 billion, after
RON-denominated loans increased by 20% and foreign currency-denominated
ones, expressed in RON, rose 8.2%, according to data transmitted by NBR
on Monday. The year-on-year growth rate had been 15.8% in April and
15.7% in March. In real terms, the balance of loans grew by 1.8%
year-on-year in May 2022, amid the 4.8% advance of the RON-denominated
component and the 7.6% increase in the foreign currency-denominated
one, if the indicator is expressed in euro.
The Ministry of Economy has put up for public consultation the Decision
on the establishment of a state aid scheme aimed at providing grants
for investments in the manufacturing industry. The main objective of
the state aid scheme proposed by the Ministry of Economy is to provide
grants for initial investments or for an initial investment for a new
economic activity in the manufacturing industry. It will be implemented
based on the financing agreements issued by the Ministry of Economy
until 31 December 2023, and the state aid will be paid during the
period 2022-2027, within the limit of the annual budget allocated to
the scheme, the RON equivalent of EUR 150 million.
Sustainability is a trend that companies and the financial-banking
environment must increasingly follow. Important steps in this direction
are being taken both by banks and by the business environment in
Romania. Ștefan Dinu, Head of Lending, Wholesale Banking Division, at
ING Bank Romania, has stated that ING supported about 320 sustainable
transactions at global level, in 2021, up by 250% compared to 2020. In
Romania, the first green loan was granted in 2021, and since then the
bank has been involved in approximately EUR 250 million such
transactions.
On Monday, CEC Bank launched a one-month promotional offer to attract
people’s savings by increasing interest rates on deposits depending on
maturity. As a result, the interest rate for one-year deposits has
increased from 4.5%-4.6% to 6%, and the one for the three-year maturity
has grown from 5-5.1% to 6.5%. Interest rate for one-month deposits has
got from 2-2.1% to 3.5% Banks are competing to attract people’s savings
given the extremely tense situation on the interbank market, where
NBR’s tougher monetary policy has led to a reduction in available
liquidity.
Banca Transilvania, through its technical team, has developed, adopted
and scaled the FLOWX.AI technology on existing systems. It is a
cloud-native platform, which allows the bank to permanently increase
its agility, translated especially in the speed of response in customer
relations, according to a press release. It is also the main solution
used by BT for the digital transformation of internal processes.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has
expressed its optimism about the development of the local and regional
insurance market, following the record results obtained by Euroins
Insurance Group (EIG) in Bulgaria in 2021, guided by the strong
performance of its biggest entity, Euroins Romania Asigurare
Reasigurare. EIG is one of the largest independent general insurance
groups in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Last year, the
EBRD acquired a minority stake in the group to support the development
and growth of its Romanian unit, committing to invest €30 million
through a capital increase. Еurohold, the insurance group’s parent
company, committed to provide a new €12 million capital injection.
Medima Health, a network of clinics specializing in medical imaging and
radiology, has opened a clinic in Braila, a EUR 1.5 million investment,
according to company officials. The new clinic offers CT and MRI
imaging services. Medima has thus reached eight clinics on the local
market. Medima Health centers ended 2021 with a RON 14 million
turnover, compared to RON 3 million in the previous year, according to
mfinante.ro. In the past two years, following the takeover by Morphosis
Capital investment fund, Medima centers have constantly expanded, being
present in Bucharest, Alba Iulia, Călărași or Sibiu.
Real estate developer Zacaria, part of the international group Alf
Mizzi & Sons, founded in Malta, is to open a retail park in the
town of Cisnădie in Sibiu, in the second half of next year, following
an over EUR 11 million investment. The project will be developed
through the reconversion of the former Cisnădie carpet factory, on a
total area of 11,500 square meters, and will include a 9,000 square
meter leasable area and a supermarket anchor, according to data
transmitted on Monday by real estate consultancy firm CBRE Romania,
which manages the leasing activity within the project and has already
started the process of leasing the commercial spaces.
The new Aniroc Signature Hotel, an investment made by the Cosma and
Țucudean families, was inaugurated in Arad at the end of last week. BRD
Groupe Société Générale participated in the project with a EUR 4
million long-term financing, the bank has announced. The Aniroc
Signature Hotel, which is located in the center of Arad, combines
industrial and modern styles, while preserving the touch of Arad’s
past.
The transformer substation (110/20kV) in Vicov, Suceava County, will be
modernized by replacing some high and medium voltage equipment and by
integrating it into SCADA (remote control and data acquisition).
Moreover, the 110 kV Vicov - Rădăuți power line will be modernized over
a length of 17 km and new connections will be established between
Vicov, Rădăuți and Egger stations to increase supply reliability. The
main objective of the works is to take over energy produced from
renewable resources in conditions of safe operation of the National
Energy System (NES), to reduce the own technological consumption (OTC),
to improve the performance indicators of the electrical power
distribution service, namely the technical quality parameters of
distributed energy and the electricity supply continuity indicators.
On Monday, 27 June 2022, President Klaus Iohannis challenged, at the
Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR), the law amending and completing
Government Emergency Ordinance 155/2001 on the approval of the stray
dogs management program. Among other things, the Head of State
indicated that the removal of the sanction for failure to vaccinate
dogs – both stray and non-stray ones - deprived the state of the
sanctioning instrument necessary to protect public health against the
spread of the rabies virus.
On Monday, 27 June 2022, President Klaus Iohannis promulgated the law
approving Government Emergency Ordinance (OUG) 113/2021 completing
Government Ordinance 45/1997 on the establishment of the Company
"Compania naţională de transporturi aeriene române - TAROM" - S.A.
("Romanian National Air Transport Company - TAROM" - S.A). The
normative act creates the legal framework allowing the Government to
approve the amount, form and conditions for granting an individual
restructuring state aid to TAROM, thus ensuring the successful
implementation of the restructuring plan targeting the company’s medium
and long-term profitability.
The US government committed USD 14 million for an engineering and
design study that would provide the basis for deploying small modular
reactors (SMR) for a new nuclear plant in Romania. The Front-End
Engineering and Design (FEED) study is expected to be completed in
eight months, following an investment of USD 28 million, including
contributions from Romanian nuclear power firm Nuclearelectrica and
NuScale, the US company that provides the SMR technology. Romania
selected the site of a former coal-fired power plant to host the first
SMR power plant, and the study will provide key site-specific data –
cost, construction, schedule, and licensing details – necessary for the
deployment of NuScale’s reactors, the White House said on Sunday, 26
June.
Life expectancy at birth in Romania in 2021 fell to the level recorded
14 years ago, in 2007, while other European countries managed, after
the first year of decline, to return to levels close to those recorded
before the pandemic, according to data from the Friedrich Ebert Romania
Foundation. In the entire Europe, after more than two decades of
growth, life expectancy saw a significant decline in the two years of
the pandemic, according to an infographic on the evolution of life
expectancy in 2020-2021.