 ON THE VERGE BETWEEN "ECONOMY OF SURVIVAL" AND "ECONOMY OF SCALE" |
Bulgaria's economy has started to accumulate a critical mass. Despite the collapse of the large industrial giants like the industrial truck maker Balkancar or the nation-wide system of heavy machine building enterprises, crucial sectors have been preserved - cement, iron and steel, coal, heavy soda, synthetic fertilizers, tourism, telecommunications, even IT. Slow privatization seems to have helped trim off redundancies and channel national resources back within their natural riverbeds. With the world around in quiet turmoil and constantly perched on the verge of one regional crisis or another, Bulgaria seems to be on the verge of a shift from an economy of survival to an economy of scale.
Bulgaria already has the nucleus of private industrial
and financial entities in which national and foreign
capital has started to seamlessly merge. With the
bulk of privatization objectives completed, one
way or another, what was left is either heavily
overlaid with politics, or too large to be an individual
target, or open to the elements of modern business.
USD 5 million equals USD 5 million anywhere. The
outstanding issue now is to add some positive image
to the value of these USD 5 million in order to
have them invested in this country. As life is the
same everywhere, business is the same everywhere.
It needs a critical mass of inherent natural and
geopolitical potential, material assets promising
a comfortable margin of profit, and an image of
stability and reliability. |
"It is like selling wine", Plamen Grozdanov of Domaine Boyar, the largest Bulgarian wine maker and seller, said. "Wine is a product that needs a lot of image behind it to compete."
Maybe Bulgaria still does not have the necessary image to sell itself on a high level, but all the ingredients of that image have always been in place.
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