“The CEE market of approximately 100 million people is well positioned to respond to those growing needs from global corporations," John Duckworth, managing director Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) at JLL, said in a press release made available to SeeNews on Wednesday. "The stalwarts, such as Poland and Romania for example, are seeing increasingly advanced roles being added to the spectrum of executed processes in the existing centres.”
“The options for global decision makers across the CEE are multiplying. Alongside the EU members of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, which all feature full EU compliance, Croatia and Serbia have also emerged as strong alternative shoring locations," he added.
In addition, within the central and eastern EU member states, the external accessibility, internal connectivity and infrastructure have improved greatly since EU accession in 2004 and 2007 respectively.
"During the research process carried out to identify main globally shoring services providers, we have come to the conclusion that most major players have opened at least one centre in Romania. In addition there is a constant trend to set up in Romania higher value functions," JLL said in its "Onshore, Nearshore, Offshore: Unsure?" report.
The first multinational company to open a business process outsourcing (BPO) type operation in Romania was Genpact, in 2005. At the end of 2011 the company was employing over 1,500 specialists in Bucharest and Cluj Napoca. Since then, the industry has flourished, each year announcing several new entrants to the Romanian market.
New openings are still being recorded but not at the same pace witnessed three to four years ago. There is still untapped potential in a number of Romania's cities that are also well established university centres, including Targu Mures, Sibiu and Craiova, among others.
There is increased competition to attract shoring services not only between the capital, Bucharest, and top regional cities, but between Romania and neighbouring countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and most recently Turkey.
Availability of consistent state aid schemes will represent a key driver to attract larger multinationals to set up specialist centres with more than 200 employees in Bucharest and identified regional cities.
"Romania offers highly qualified and talented source pool. There is language availability for both common foreign languages as well as for Nordics languages. Combined financial and non-financial packages still maintain the country on the map of low end remuneration system compared with Western countries or even core closer Central European countries," the report said.
Real estate infrastructure has diversified and improved with modern office supply now available in the established Romanian shoring locations as well as other few emerging shoring locations. The fit-out of the office space started to play a major role in retention or attracting talented work pool, it added.
