After many years of fighting to save his businesses, with numerous failures and a few successes that helped him get back on his feet, Zoltan Prosszer says, talking with BUSINESS Magazin, that he is now feeling like he did twenty years ago. Just like he did back then, when he was starting the business that would turn into a real automotive empire, he now has to decide where to go.

In the almost twenty years since his start, Zoltan Prosszer has lived a slightly different history than most entrepreneurs – having learnt many years ago what insolvency, reorganisation, battle with banks and bankruptcy are. Few companies found themselves unable to repay their instalments to the bank or experienced a forced sale during the economic boom in the past. In times of growth, as Romania’s over the last eight years, businesses grew fast, in sync with the market, with few notable failures. There have been only a handful of high-profile bankruptcies: the failure of the electrical retail network Cosmo (founded by businessman Gyorgy Baba), of the Univers’all store chain (created by Razvan Petrovici) and, the latest one, which happened recently, of the IpoteciDirect (MortgageDirect) credit broker (established by seven experienced businessmen). Prosszer has been through such an experience more than once. His story gets a special meaning when put in the context of an economy that is no longer growing in full gear, of the shrinking markets, of banks closing, and of increasingly more common arrearage in the day-to-day operations.

Zoltan Prosszer started his business in 1991, when he was 27, by investing 1,400 euros to open a shop that sold car parts, which he used to bring in his own car from Italy. He then opened a car repair shop with the money he got from mortgaging his apartment and after that the business took off. In 1996, the group he developed, Paneuro Group, became the market leader on the car part segment and continued to increase until 2002, when it comprised more than 20 companies and employed about 1,400 people. Each line of business was handled by a separate company, which worked with the others in such a way as to create markets for each other. The core was the retail company, Paneuro Trading, which had been established in 1994 and reached 20 million-euro turnover ten years later. Prosszer was one of the first Romanian entrepreneurs to create a group, which eventually turned out to be the Achilles’ heel for his business. Decline started after 2002, and his companies, which had guaranteed loans for each other, went bankrupt one by one between 2004-2005 (Paneuro Trading, Paneuro Leasing, Atu, Novator, Muss) or had to be sold (Aliat). Only of a few companies of the group remain today (Paneuro International, Romcab, Motoplus Paneuro).

Romcab, the low voltage electrical wiring factory in Targu Mures, which Prosszer bought for one million dollars chiefly because of its warehouses and land ten years ago, was what saved him from complete bankruptcy and is now his main business. He owns about 72% in it, along with a Dutch investment fund – MEI, 5% and Morgan Stanley – 12.2%, with the rest of the shares traded on RASDAQ.

Though still going through reorganisation, which started in 2004, when it took over 11.5 million dollars (9.5 million euros) in debt from the companies that had gone bankrupt, Romcab is a solid company, Prosszer says. Its market share stands at 10% and demand is higher than it can handle, he adds, even though it has lost a few contracts since the onset of the economic crisis.