Andrzej Gladki has over 15 years of international experience in sales, marketing, product management, partnerships and team management. He has been employed by Xiaomi since 2019, where he supervises the activity in 26 countries and was personally involved both in the inauguration of the first store, in Mega Mall, and in the second one, in Sun Plaza.
"I personally got involved (n.r - in the opening of the store), because Romania is a very important market for us. That's why I was super involved in Romania from the beginning, because when I joined the company at the beginning of 2019, my boss asked me which markets, apart from Poland, could have development potential. Of course, Romania was my clear choice. Also Hungary. So, that's why I was involved from the beginning and even opened, in 2019, the store in the Mega Mall. Then we built the team, started to develop the business. (…) I also joke and say that I am becoming half Romanian. And, of course, the pandemic stopped everything".
Rep: You said in the opening speech of the new store that Romania is a very important market for Xiaomi, but what exactly does that mean?
Let's just say that size matters. In our region, Romania is the biggest market after Poland and Ukraine. So from that point of view it is clearly bigger than all other markets. That is, after these three markets, each one is significantly smaller, such as the Czech Republic or Hungary or Austria. So, size is one thing, and then Romania is kind of a classic stage market. That's why for these markets, we know, we're confident that our business model and our approach has just shown me that it works very well. So we are confident that we will be successful, even if the pandemic stopped us for a while. We certainly have the appetite and see many more opportunities to grow the business. Because in terms of market share and presence, we are in many, many places much more advanced. So, there is still a lot to do in Romania.
Some people ask how many stores we have in Poland? 24. In the Czech Republic? 23. And this is the second store in Romania. And Ukraine has 30. At the moment, it's not about the number of stores, how many are planned or I don't know what else. Does not matter. We need to start with a few stores and then see the performance, the behavior, and then analyze. Also, this is related to the structure of the country, such as: the size and number of cities. You know, Bucharest is somehow simple, I will say, but in a country there is an urban area and a rural area. And every country is different. And this is the urbanization factor. We will definitely open stores in other cities.