Microsoft Romania's CEO says that the business of the company has gone down by 10-15% in the last fiscal year but the economy cannot go down that much since there are so many Bentleys and Mercedeses on the streets.
Microsoft Romania, the local subsidiary of world's biggest software producer would end the fiscal 2009 (July 1 2008 - July 3 2009) with a 10-15% decline in revenues, thus missing the growth estimates made at the end of last year by 1 to 4%, stated Calin Tatomir, the company's chief executive.
"In October, at the end of a very good quarter of the fiscal year, after a contract won from the Ministry of Education, we said we were going to fight for a 1-2 to 4% growth. We did not succeed in doing so. We have to face it, in a few days we will end the fiscal year with a decline of 10 to 15% of the business, depending on the number of contracts to be signed in the last week of the fiscal year, which is traditionally a very good period for Microsoft," Tatomir said. "Very few companies probably reached their targets or budgets set twelve months ago," Microsoft Romania's CEO said.
"The worst hit was the segment of sales of licenses for new computers, which is directly influenced by deliveries of computers. Given that sales of laptops went down by more than 40% from January through March 2009 and desktop sales dropped by more than 60%, we too felt a major impact. There was an extremely powerful wave that hit the retail. We know about the situation of Ultra Pro, the difficulties on the market and the consolidation trend among players on the market," he explained.
Tatomir also added that the delayed adoption of the state budget and the authorities' delayed response to the propositions made by the private sector had hit the company's business.
On the other hand, "(...) The corporate segment compensated the abrupt decline of the retail segmen
