120 top franchises

With affairs figures of over a billion euro in the first half of the year, this kind of business gains more ground.

The cheapest franchise affairs from the Romanian market are requiring investments of 3.500 euro, and the most expensive surpass two millions, according to the "Capital" magazine supplement "120 top franchises from Romania", launched yesterday. The cheapest franchises after the initial investment are Rodipet (350 euro), Trident Dental (500 euro) and American Hot Dog (starting from 800 euro).

Datas released by the franchise consultancy company CHR Consulting show that the number of the affairs developed in franchise system is growing with 20% a year, in the last four years. If last year we had 350 brands of franchises, 94 of them being Romanian, at the end of this year's first semester we reached 403 franchises, 155 of them founded by Romanians. Also, in the last years, Romanians are willing to invest more money in a franchise business.

"About the medium level of the investors from the franchise market, a growth trend is recorded, from 150.000 euro to 200.000 euro per unit, in the retail sector, and from 25.000 euro to 40.000 euro, in the services domain", said, yesterday, at the supplement releasing, Iulian Bortos, chief editor of "Capital".

The Capital, the center of franchises

The franchises networks from Romania made, in the first semester, an affairs figure of 1.2 billions euro, according to Razvan Bild, general manager of CHR Consulting. Almost a third (31%) of the foreign franchises from Romania are from the US. These are followed by the Italian franchises (21%) and French ones (13%).

The trampoline for International franchises remains Bucharest, where the inhabitants have the largest consume power of the country. Romania's large cities, like Cluj-Napoca, Timisoara, Iasi, Constanta and Brasov, are good "hosts" for the franchise business. According to the "Capital" rankings, Rodipet is the local franchise with the most active units - 370. It's followed by Auguri, with 145 units, and Romstal - with 107 units. ROBOT PORTRAIT

Most of the franchisers worked for owners

The persons who choose to invest in franchise business are, mostly, 30 to 45 years old. Most of them (over 70%) of those who form the 120 franchise networks from the "Capital" supplement have superior studies. The same proportion of 70% is kept when looking at the previous job, most of them being former employees.

Also, if we analyze the source of the money used to found the franchises we can see that half of the investment is covered by the businessman, while the other half is represented by loans from friends or banks.