Almost two years ago, towards the end of the first year after EU accession, Liliana Solomon, head of the local branch of the Vodafone group issued a warning to the managers enthusing over consumer spending euphoria and the potential of a 21 million-people market with a rising purchasing power during a meeting organised by BUSINESS Magazin.

”Those that make a difference in business are the people who think of ”what if”, not those who say they will grow next year, anyway,” said Solomon, who has a financial background and had worked for major telecom operators in London for years, coming back home in 2005 to take the reins of Vodafone Romania.

The only participant to that discussion that shared the same opinion was her good friend Mariana Gheorghe, a former EBRD banker, who had taken the reins of the biggest company in the country, Petrom, in 2006. On the other side of the fence were executives in consumer goods, financial services, IT and real estate industries, all of them enthusiastic about the higher than expected results that were about to be achieved in 2007, Romania’s first year of EU membership.

Less than two years on, the Romanian economy is in full recession, the Gross Domestic Product fell by 7.6% in the first quarter and by 8.8% in the second, heading towards the first annual decline since 2000, a period during which it has tripled (in nominal value). The total number of the unemployed will exceed 800,000 at the end of the year (according to official estimates), compared with only 400,000 last year, whereas arrearage and the acute lack of cash have become ordinary components of the Romanian business landscape.

Against this background, BUSINESS Magazin intends to bring into the spotlight the managers of the most profitable companies and their business networks, in an attempt to analyse the structure of the Romanian economy, as shown by the ranking of the top performing private companies.

More than half of the 100 biggest private companies in the country saw their profits increase in 2008, according to data on the Finance Ministry’s website, even though in the second half of the year some star industries of recent years such as real estate, automotive and consumer goods froze, as a result of the deepening global financial crisis and spreading of that turmoil to emerging markets like Romania.

How much of this trend was because of managers and how much was because of a well-oiled organisation? Radu Furnica, LDS Korn/Ferry Romania and the man who has discovered and recruited some of the most important executives in the country in the course of time, believes it is very hard to establish an immediate causality between profitability of a corporation and its top management.

”Simple logic says that those that made the biggest profit also had the best managers. This is not a rule though! On the contrary, most of the top 25 companies by profit are in the upper end of the ranking because they are very large companies, which are hard to beat and which were helped by the market,” Furnica says.

Consultants, however, say that the personal touch of the person who runs the business is very important in the long run, too, though. Codrut Pascu, head of the local office of management advisory firm Roland Berger says that in order to determine the contribution of the manager, one must look at the extent to which the targets (market share growth, profit, cash flow) were reached, but especially at how the company developed compared to its direct competitors and how prepared the respective companies are to deal with hardships.