Retail sales up almost 15%, IT&C among top rates with 20% and steadying

Romanian retail sales keep strong momentum, accelerating to a whopping 14.9% rate year on year (YoY) in January 2016, after a 1.9% monthly expansion, coming from 14.2% YoY in December 2015 (upwardly revised from 13.0%), as fuel sales surged, says an ING report.

"There have been some significant backward data revisions, with 2015 retail sales now looking better for the whole year, particularly in the second semester. Meanwhile, 2016's start was solid for retail after fuel sales jumped by a whopping 7% monthly in January 2016, as prices went down both due to the cheaper crude and the 4 points headline VAT cut. This helped take the headline rate to its best level since September 2008," says ING.

Meanwhile, sales of food items are up 26.1% YoY, with probably around half of this expansion reflecting a lower tax evasion after the VAT for these goods was cut in Jun-15.

"The retail activity for non-food goods is, in our opinion, a better gauge for the overall consumer morale. In January 2016, although flat on the month, retail sales for non-food items were up by 10.6% YoY from a year ago, more than four times larger than the average expansion in 2015 (of +2.5%)," say ING experts.

This print seems largely driven by sales of clothing, footwear and IT&C, which expanded well in excess of 20% YoY, while sales of household appliances are not doing as well, but are still growing nicely.
The appetence for spending seems high also if you look at tourism services (up by 16% YoY in Jan-16), auto sales (+13.8% YoY) and RON consumer loans (+10.9% YoY), ING analysts conclude.

Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellisonrecently marked a major milestone in the company's autonomous strategy with the availability of the latest Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Service, Oracle Autonom

Ness Digital Engineering, one of the leading global providers of IT services, is consolidating the activities of its center based in Palas Iași, adding two major companies in the field of telecom, media & ente

Technology consultancy company BearingPoint announced that it is expanding its Security Advisory Center of Excellence (CoE) in Romania.

Digital transformation company Connections, operating in Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia, has signed a partnership with UiPath, the Enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform with the fastest acquisitio

Endava opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol "DAVA" following its initial public offering.

The end of the first semester has brought into light great achievements from regional cities in all real estate segments. Bucharest has also performed well and, according to the real estate consultancy company

Atos and Syntel have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Atos will acquire Syntel for cash consideration of c. 3.4 billion US dollars, 41.0 Us dollars per share, representing apx. 14 per cent

Turkish-owned software company TotalSoft said on Monday it has completed the acquisition and merger of Romanian business management consultancy group Architected Business Solutions (ABS). The deal was announced

The Lufthansa Innovation Hub and the SAP.iO Foundries program in Berlin launched the "Aviation Blockchain Challenge" to draw attention to the potential of blockchain technology in the aviation industry, uncover

The Via Transilvanica online platform, a concept initiated by the Tăşuleasa Social Association, was developed pro-bono by an Endava team in three months. A smartphone application, interactivity and tagging fu

How to succeed in reaching the young and the valuable employees and wining their hearts and minds, so they will forever be committed to gain knowledge, evolve in profession and build a strong career inside the

There are over 250.000 employees only in the class A and B office buildings in Bucharest and around one million employees spread around the city. How does the office market cope with the need of companies to ac

The ink is not yet dry in terms of GDPR's EU compliance regulations and the last few months have been a very useful exercise for everybody, either vendor, producer or consumer to understand that rigid concepts

With the work demand expressed for the "traditional" job openings in ITO, HRO, BPO or SSC, the question formulated by the industry stakeholders points to some concerns regarding the future availability of the s

As Romania's outsourcing sector is currently estimated to employ more than 100,000 people, a constant evolution in the past years (with 15.000 employees registered in 2007), the local market is a popular nearsh