"We are no longer granting finance to companies we would have accepted a year or two years ago. In the past we would more readily finance start-ups, but we are now looking more carefully and prefer established companies. Secondly, we started to exchange information with other leasing companies for the first time this year, to avoid taking somebody else's bad-paying customers in our portfolio," Septimiu Postelnicu, general manager of UniCredit Leasing, told ZIARUL FINANCIAR in an interview.
Postelnicu, one of the best-known managers in the leasing business says the 4 RON/EUR threshold is a serious warning about the repayment capability of the financing granted to both companies and individuals.
"Four RON against one euro is a sufficiently serious threshold to draw everybody's attention. This is a very serious warning already, this is no joke. We cannot wait for the exchange rate to increase, we are already starting to raise questions," UniCredit Leasing's boss said.
He believes Romanian companies have forgotten what it means to manage foreign exchange risk after several years of relative stability, and the crisis will teach them a "painful lesson" and show them the risk really exists. Corporate clients account for 90% of UniCredit Leasing's portfolio.
"Because financing will be more difficult to get, it is only now that we will truly learn what a competitive environment is. Until now, you only had to be on the market to grow your business. We will see larger and smaller companies alike go bankrupt, mergers and acquisitions, and I don't mean the banking sector here, but the entire economy." The fields that are most exposed to the crisis, he stated, are commodity transport and real estate, both construction and deals.
"The commodity transport industry is seeing significant declines across the entire of Europe, and the circulation of goods has slowed down. With the decline in the number of transactions in the real estate sector, real estate leasing will go down, too, and borrowing restrictions imposed on individuals will lead to a decline in housing construction."
Postelnicu said that the keyword in times of financial crisis is 'planning'. "We are more than willing to continue to finance all the fields, but we select only companies that know how to plan their operations. The crisis will be a time of success for those who know how to plan. This is the keyword now: 'planning'. Those who know how to do business will continue to do it and swallow others. Companies have had time to plan their operations, because the crisis came as no surprise and was first signalled one or two years ago. At the end of this crisis we will see that the economy will choose a series of winners that survived through these hard times and knew how to plan ahead."
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