Miele Tehnica Romania: Adjusting to a flexible business environment

Represented locally by a production plant at Brasov, Miele, a worldwide producer of premium domestic appliances puts its faith in a more predictable future in terms of business regulations but, at the same time, shows confidence in local market advantages, the company representatives told The Diplomat-Bucharest in a recent interview.

2014-10-02 11:35:24

"Before looking at the local aspects, we are closely watching global indicators such as the country risk, which improved significantly from the ninth place when we started out our business in Romania to the 26th place from 43 countries, according to the 2014 ranking," says Hartmut Hohaus, Managing Director Miele Tehnica Romania.

For a company in this field, Miele keeps a close eye on the plans at Brasov/Ghimbav airport, as local investments are of great interest, especially those regarding infrastructure. "In the last five years we have been continuously following the plans for the airport in Braşov/Ghimbav. We already know that at the end of September the new airport runway will be ready. We are looking forward to see the rest of the airport inaugurated soon," says Hohaus.

The legislative frame has also a major impact on Miele business. According to the manager, there is a positive trend visible with the changing of the law regarding decisional transparency in business administration. "A draft normative submitted to public debate is certainly an improvement, which is in our advantage. In this sense, we have also used the opportunity to express our proposal for changes regarding the new Labour Code. But a challenging aspect in our business environment is the emergency ordinances issued by the government, which makes budget planning slightly more difficult. Nevertheless, we salute the positive measures such as the exemption of tax on reinvested profit," states Hohaus.

Regarding in what Miele is interested on the local market, one of the main strengths of the local landscape consists of the available workforce. "It is our duty to get the right specialist in the right place in order to be successful. For that we established an HR strategy in our company regarding the development of young people and we work very closely with universities in the whole country. We organize trainee programs and we sponsor and participate in student contests, like TIE (i.e. Design of Electronic modules and Assemblies) in the field of electronic science and education. Moreover, we develop and finance the modernizing of university facilities, such as the laboratories," states Hohaus.

According to the Miele manager, quality investors generally look at four aspects when they decide to invest: flexibility of work force, infrastructure, the functioning of the juridical system and the reliability of the financial markets. "We also took into account these aspects and meanwhile we learned to adapt and exercise our flexibility regarding the international and local economic world in continuous change," Hohaus says.

Miele is the world leader in the field of premium domestic appliances, being represented in over 100 countries. Their products are manufactured in 12 Miele factories, of which 8 are located in Germany. The Miele Company, founded in 1899, is now in the fourth generation of family ownership, employs a workforce of around 17,250. The total turnover of the group in the last business year was 3.15 billion Euro. The Company headquarters is located in Gütersloh/Westphalia, Germany.

In Braşov, Romania, Miele built in 2008 a production plant for electronic boards. Here, they produce electronic controllers for Miele devices using state of the art equipment. Now in the sixth year of production, Miele Tehnica has around 200 employees, out of which 40 are engineers.