Alin Ioanes, Rombat: “2025 will be a year with significant growth compared to 2024”

“A year ago, the keyword was sustainability and everyone was talking about sustainability. Today, everyone is talking about competitiveness and how we can stay competitive. I’m afraid we’ve been too focused on sustainability and forgotten how to stay competitive. Sustainability doesn’t come without costs and without major investments.

We live in a world where we are competing with companies from other markets and continents. We have to stay competitive in some difficult circumstances. We are asked to run companies, to perform, but this performance is directly correlated to the economic environment in which we operate. As long as this environment doesn’t help us move in the right direction, we might have problems.

We have grown sustainably, we are in the best year of our existence, we have integrated new products, new manufacturing lines, but we have reached the point where any investment we want to make is difficult to justify because we no longer have that bottom line that would allow us to sustain another investment,” Alin Ioanes, CEO Rombat said during Automotive Forum 2024 organized by Automotive Today and The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“Any investor calculates a return on investment over a certain period of time. We are somehow in a trap: we want to make investments to be more efficient and competitive, but at the same time we are unable to generate the bottom line we need.

We have talented people, extraordinary engineers, very creative people and the human resources we need. It is important to attract these people, to keep them and to motivate them, but these things are not enough. It is also important to have a friendly economic environment in which to carry out our activity and in which to move forward.

It is very important that the automotive industry has a common voice, and that Romania has a country strategy and a list of priorities that also includes this industry that produces 13% of GDP.

We see that there is a concern not only in the automotive industry regarding the dynamics of 2025. There are many unknowns both in the geopolitical area and in other areas. We are working with different scenarios and of course there is also a pessimistic scenario on the table.

From our perspective, 2025 will be a year with significant growth compared to 2024, which also brought significant growth compared to 2023.”