Petru Vaduva met the two Tiriacs, father and son, on December 22, 2008 at the recommendation of head-hunter Radu Furnica. On January 7, Petru Vaduva was already in his office, having replaced the former CEO, Anca Ioan, who left the position in October.

The new manager is calm and recounts the facts plainly, like a surgeon, about his business expertise abroad and about the challenges of the new job. He does not grin, he does not frown, he does not rush it. He speaks as confidently about bankruptcies of tens of millions of dollars as he speaks about philosophy and the restructuring of the business he has been running for only a few weeks.

His appointment came as a surprise to the business environment in Romania, because few people had heard about or met the manager to whom Ion Tiriac decided to entrust the group put at 2 billion euros last year. Furthermore, Ion Tiriac is thought to be a businessman who likes to have the final (and most important) say in strategic decisions. And strategic decisions are what is needed in what looks to be the most difficult moment of the last ten years for the consumer and financial fields, where most of Tiriac group’s businesses are grouped. With a keen interest in molecular biology, Petru Vaduva left Romania alone to go to college in the United States in 1982. After college he started doctoral studies at Columbia University, but three years into it he realised it would never fulfil his American dream.

”Considering the situation back home, and the fact that my duties to my family were much more important than those of a young American studying biology and wanting to save the world from cancer, I decided to change my path,” Petru Vaduva recalls. At first he thought he would do business in biotechnology and worked for a year on neuro-research projects in a specialised company. He also got into an MBA at the Yale University (one of the most prestigious such programmes in the world) and was hired by JP Morgan after graduation.

During his JP Morgan tenure he spent four years and a half involved in the Latin America ”project”, which had him live in New York but regularly fly to the Latin American countries 40% of the time, where he experienced both a boom and the crisis of 1994. The crisis in Mexico was just the beginning and Petru Vaduva went from crisis to crisis, which he considers to be part of the nature of his job of specialist in developing countries. He was in Asia for the following crisis, and then in Moscow and was no stranger to the dotcom crisis either.

His return to Romania started in the second half of the nineties, when he got a job offer in Russia. Convinced he was getting closer to Romania this way, he took the job with an investment banking group in 1997, which did not survive the crisis in that country. Back in Romania at the first signs of crisis with plans to start an investment fund, he accepted Ion Tiriac’s offer and now would not provide figures about what or how will happen. He admits, through, that the strategy of the group will be focused on two pillars from now on: not losing money and keeping the market share.

Restructuring is another key element of Petru Vaduva’s strategy at the helm of Tiriac Holdings, although he admits it may sound a bit negative somehow. ”The company grew - as many businesses in developing countries did, a bit chaotically and the challenge of this job is precisely restructuring. When crisis comes, you start seeing all the holes that had not been visible before. (...)”

In brief, Vaduva’s plan is as follows: the group will not enter other fields of business over the coming period, will not sell any of its existing divisions and will not start a real estate project in the coming months.