Ovidiu Sandor Makes EUR8M From Offices And Luxury Clothing

05.24.2011 ZF English

Ovidiu Sandor, president of Moda-Tim, has made a business out of taking advantage of the office space shortage in Timisoara and of the tradition in the clothing industry of a company that manufactures products for luxury brands such as Burberry and Escada. He is now taking advantage of a new opportunity: non-reimbursable European funds for a new office building.

Businessman Ovidiu Sandor, 40, who controls Moda-Tim SA and Moda-Tim Investment in Timisoara, with around EUR8 million in cumulated revenues in 2010, will start construction of the fourth office building this year that will be located on the plot of the former clothing manufacturer, which he inherited from his father.

{andor took advantage of the plant's position in central Timisoara in Piata 700 square, and on the shortage of office space in the city. Currently in Timisoara there are about 80,000 square meters of modern office space, i.

e. around one square meter per four residents, while in Bucharest the stock is nearly 2 million square meters, i.e. one square meter per capita.

In 2005 Ovidiu Sandor took over management of Moda-Tim and started to develop the largest office park in Timisoara, City Business Center, where he rented out space to companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Wipro, Microsoft, UniCredit, Raiffeisen and Autoliv, while the clothing business was moved outside the city.

Sandor has accessed EU financing to build a fourth building in City Business Center, which entails an overall investment of around EUR11 million, but found that even non-reimbursable loans have their cost.

"The approval and the signing of the contract took around one year, so I would say it didn't take long, considering a bank loan takes around 6 to 9 months to be approved. The complicated part is the bureaucracy of implementing the project and of actually getting the EU financing to cover the costs of the project, and the fact that you have to conduct public tenders, whose procedures are more complicated. In other words, getting this financing entails an additional effort," Sandor told ZF in an interview.

What makes a building erected with EU funds that cover 60% of the construction costs, or around EUR5 million, so special compared with the first three buildings made largely with money from banks?

According to the businessman, it will have a 600 square-meter conference hall that could not have been built with financing from banks because its operating revenues are not predictable. It will also have half a floor with serviced offices - equipped offices, to be rented out short-term for companies that for instance want to test a project without signing a long-term commitment.