ADRIAN VASILESCU, BNR: "SMEs have lost the vocation of the job well done"

Small and medium enterprises (SME) need to learn to be competitive and to operate in a hostile environment, Adrian Vasilescu, advisor to th governor of the National Bank of Romania (BNR), said yesterday, in a conference on the topic of financing for SMEs.

He said that the small and medium companies have lost the vocation of "job well done": "Between the two wars, doing a good job was a custom, from the people shining shoes in the Northern Railway station, to the builders who erected the buildings in Bucharest. Nowadays, we have a different vocation: < < it'll do > >".

Between the two wars, the food industry consisted only of small and medium enterprises, he said.

In order to emphasize the importance which the SMEs had in the past, not just in our country, but internationally as well, Adrian Vasilescu mentioned a letter addressed to Hitler by a German general, who was saying that on a Europe where "people are starving" it is "immoral" that in Romania there were 23 types of bread being sold.

The SMEs are complaining that they are operating in a hostile environment, but if there is no alternative, they need to learn how they can win in that kind of environment, according to the advisor of the NBR.

He explained: "There are three keywords which should guide our way to the future: correction - because we need to correct what we did wrong, recovery - because we need to recover what we lost and competition - because there is no way around it in the world we live in. It's as if we don't have any mood for competition. We don't like it".

Adrian Vasilescu emphasized the fact that a company which has very few employees currently must act like a multinational company.