BULGARIA: Bulgarian Roses and Dutch Tulips

SOFIA, Bulgaria (The Sofia Echo), April 4, 2008: By Rene Beekman A black Mercedes pulled up in front of a company office somewhere in the Netherlands. Out came an elderly Bulgarian business man, followed by his son. The two had just driven all the way from Bulgaria to the Netherlands. The elderly man did not speak English too well, so he had brought his son along. On entering the office, they announced the reason for their visit: “We would like to buy 10 of your wind turbines.” After overcoming the initial surprise of this somewhat unusual approach to doing business, negotiations followed and a deal was reached. When it was time to arrange payment, the elderly businessman asked his new business partners to follow him. They went outside to the car, where the man opened the trunk and proudly showed the trunk’s content. It was filled with all the cash needed for the payment. __________________________________________________________ Seniors World Chronicle comments: The Direct Approach is disappearing in human relations, in business dealing, in international affairs. Hence this story appears on this site. ___________________________________________________________ Everyday business between Bulgarian and foreign, in this case Dutch, businesses can be full of surprises. Many of these experiences, some in the form of anecdotes, some in the form of formal presentations with “do’s and don’ts”, were shared in a seminar under the title “How to do business with the Dutch”. The seminar was jointly organised by the economic department of the Netherlands embassy in Sofia and the Bulgarian Dutch Business Club (BDBC) and took place on March 26 in Hotel Greenville. Willem van Ee, ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Bulgaria, opened the seminar. Speakers included Johannes Krikorian, head of the commercial and economic section of the Bulgarian embassy in The Hague, and Annemarie Spapens, Krikorian’s counterpart at the embassy of the Netherlands in Sofia, as well as Bulgarian and Dutch businesspersons. Presentations by Krikorian and Spapens largely outlined differences in mentalities and approaches, sometimes clarified with handy do’s and don’ts lists. Bulgarian businesswoman Vihra Andronova qualified the Dutch as “direct to the point of being impolite”. It was this directness that would dominate much of what was to follow. While Bulgarian speakers went out of their way to express how wonderful it was to do business with the Dutch, their counterparts from the Netherlands came with example after example of near-impossible business situations they had encountered. Bulgarian suppliers were often unable to meet deadlines, presenters said. Price calculation Bulgarian-style was to multiply the price of raw materials by two. A 20 per cent price increase of just one of the raw materials would regularly led to price hikes of the final product by 20 per cent or more. How the price-per-item could be lower if smaller quantities were ordered baffled most of the Dutch businesspersons in the seminar. Some participants in the closing discussion argued that history or the fact that the country was “in transition” were to blame. In the end, however, it seems that for many Bulgarian businesses the Dutch way of doing business was something they could learn from, while the Dutch, in their own unique and direct way, were trying to point out what they thought should be learnt. As Dutch businessman Ton Wouters said, “Nyama problemi, only challenges”. © 2001-2008, Sofia Echo Media Ltd.