The economy will stabilise towards the end of the year, and the conclusion of the first transactions this autumn will be the first positive sign in this regard, the officials of the audit and advisory firm Deloitte believe.

"At the beginning of the year I anticipated two years for the rebound. Now I can say I expect some clear signs at the end of this year. We are more optimistic now than we were about the rebound of the economy three months ago," said Antonis Ioannides, transaction services partner of Deloitte Financial Advisory.

As far as Deloitte is concerned, whose business stood at 36.26 million euros on the Romanian market last year, Ioannides says that the first signals have already started to show in form of an increase in the number of mandates received from investors for both selling and buying companies.

"The number of mandates is going up by the month. Compared with the last quarter of last year when the market started to freeze, there are more mandates," Ioannides added. He said that Deloitte had closed such a mandate since the beginning of the year, without providing further details, though.

This is one of the first positive signs offered by consultants on a market of mergers and acquisitions that was considered frozen since the fourth quarter of last year. The value of the mergers and acquisitions market reached 100 million euros in the first three months of this year, that is 10% of the volume registered in the same time of last year, when the value exceeded one billion euros according to Raiffeisen Investment data.

"The global signs that the economy is on the rebound will be the closing of deals, the companies that will be looking at investments again and will start to hire people. There won’t be any major global signs. Romania can stabilise on its own, but will not be able to grow significantly any more than 4-5%," Ioan