Anca Vlad was 27 when she became sales coordinator, thus controlling an export of over 200 million dolars.
In a short time, she was remarked by the pharmaceutical companies that were coming in Romania after the Revolution, given the fact that in 1987, she tansfered to the Chamber of Commerce as the main economist, where she began managing the medicines area. „I wanted very much to travel, and there I had large opportunities in this sense.” After 1989‚ just like everybody else, she started to make businesses on her own: „I used to have a salary of USD 1.200, out of which I would only receive 200”. So, she started the marketing consultancy, more exactly, she tried to make the strangers familiar with the business opportunities that Romania offered. Gradually, the pharmaceutical companies no longer had whom to sell their products to, because the state firms had fallen apart. This is how she decided to switch to the commercial side.
„The main capital I had was the trust that I earned from people.” In fact, this is how she received her first truck full of medicines worth some tens of thousands of pounds sterling. On the market, there was nobody else and the first product for which she created the marketing image from head to foot was Aqua Fresh. „I remember having bought some serials from BBC, serials that I would offer to the TV channels so that they air the advertisment for my tooth paste.” In the meanwhile, Anca Vlad started to distribute products towards the zootechnical joint in the country, and for three-to-four years, the business arrived quite atop. „The most difficult thing was to be able to concentrate. You coud do anything, bu the field of medicines has always been frustrating and the margins, reduced”, confesses Vlad. Fildas currently became one of the most powerful distributors of medicines on a national level, and Catena – a pharmacy network that matters more and more among the great chains. Anca Vlad’s dream is about to come true: „In ten years, I would like to hear people say not that they go to the chemist’s, but that they go at Catena.”
businessmagazin.ro, August 2012
