by Radu Magdin
For thirty years the economic map between Asia and Europe was drawn with a fairly simple pen. Asia made things, Western Europe bought them, and Central and Eastern Europe slowly became the workshop in between, assembling, finishing and shipping for German, French and Italian groups.
That map is being redrawn, and not gently.
Tariff threats, supply-chain shocks, the return of industrial policy in Brussels, a war on the European Union’s doorstep and a defence spending cycle not seen since the Cold War have changed the arithmetic of globalisation. For a growing number of Asian companies, selling into Europe is no longer enough. They need to produce inside it. The question in boardrooms in Seoul, Tokyo, Mumbai and Abu Dhabi is shifting from "how do we reach European customers?" to a harder and more expensive one: where do we build our European factory?
Romania should be much higher on that shortlist than it is today.
Proven and unsaturated
I would describe Romania’s proposition with two words that rarely sit together: proven and unsaturated.
Proven, because Western Europe has already run the experiment for us. When Renault bought Dacia in 1999, few in Paris imagined that Mioveni would become one of the group’s most important export platforms, shipping the overwhelming majority of its output abroad. Around it grew an entire ecosystem of component makers, engineering centres and logistics operators. Japanese suppliers such as Yazaki followed the automotive wave and have been part of Romania’s industrial fabric for years. Turkish capital, which comes from the country that literally straddles Europe and Asia, offers an equally telling precedent. Beko has put more than €391 million into its Romanian plants at Găești and Ulmi since 2002 and exports 84% of what it makes here to over 80 countries.
The lesson of that first wave matters more than any single figure. Romania showed that an investment which begins as a cost decision can mature into sophisticated production, engineering mandates and genuinely global exports.
Unsaturated, because the job is visibly unfinished. Poland has the scale, with 285 announced FDI projects in 2025 against Romania’s 109. Hungary has built the densest Asian manufacturing proposition in the region, from Korean battery plants to Chinese EV investments in Debrecen and Szeged. Czechia and Slovakia have industrial clusters so tight that a new entrant struggles to find land, suppliers or engineers. Romania offers something different: industrial credibility with a great deal of room still left to grow.
For an investor, that combination is rarer than it sounds. Mature markets offer certainty but little upside. Frontier markets offer upside but little certainty. Romania sits in the narrow band where both are available at once.
The numbers behind the argument
The recent data support the thesis rather than decorate it. According to EY’s latest attractiveness survey, Romania attracted 109 announced FDI projects in 2025, up 16%, while project numbers across Europe fell by 7%. FDI inflows climbed back to €8.1 billion. The most revealing detail is structural: expansion projects now outnumber new ones. Companies already operating in Romania are choosing to invest again, which is the most honest endorsement any destination can receive.
Costs still matter, even if they are no longer the whole story. Eurostat puts Romania’s average hourly labour cost at €13.6 in 2025, against an EU average of €34.9. That gap is narrowing fast, with Romanian labour costs rising by more than 10% in national currency last year. This is precisely why the pitch must change.
From "cheap" to "strategic"
"Come to Romania because it is cheap" belongs to the last economic cycle. It was the argument that brought the first wave of Western factories, and it will not bring the next one.
The proposition for the coming decade is more ambitious and more defensible. Build in Romania because it lets you manufacture inside the European Union and sell into the Single Market without tariff risk. Build here because it connects Central Europe to the Black Sea. Build here because Europe’s industrial and defence renewal is being written on its eastern flank. And build here because, sooner or later, Ukraine’s reconstruction will become one of the largest economic projects on the continent, and Romania is next door.
The Three-Gateway Romania
This is where the case becomes geoeconomic rather than promotional. Romania is not simply one more low-cost site in the EU. It can function as three gateways at the same time.
The first is the EU factory gateway: a member state of both the EU and NATO, with a sizeable domestic market, an established industrial base, deep engineering and IT talent, and full access to European rules, funding and customers.
The second is the Black Sea gateway. Through Constanța and the Danube, Romania links the continent’s largest inland waterway to the sea, on the Rhine–Danube corridor that runs from the North Sea ports through Central Europe to the Black Sea coast. Since 2022, when Russian blockades pushed Ukrainian grain onto Romanian rails, roads and barges, this geography has stopped being theoretical.
The third is the Ukraine reconstruction platform. Brussels already treats the Romania–Moldova–Ukraine space and the Danube–Black Sea axis as integrated logistics infrastructure. Whoever builds capacity on this side of the border today will be best placed to supply, service and finance the rebuilding tomorrow.
Poland can claim one or two of these gateways. Hungary can claim one. Very few countries in Europe can plausibly claim all three.
Hanwha and the power of a single phrase
South Korea has just offered a glimpse of what the second wave could look like. In February 2026, Hanwha Aerospace broke ground at Petrești, in Dâmbovița county, on an armoured vehicle centre of roughly 180,000 square metres that will build K9 howitzers and K10 resupply vehicles. The company describes it as its first production facility in Europe and says it already works with more than thirty Romanian partners on localisation.
"First production facility in Europe." That phrase should become a national objective.
Romania’s ambition should be to become the place where many more Asian companies build their first EU factory. Not only in defence, but across automotive and EV supply chains, batteries and components, electronics, industrial machinery, pharmaceuticals, agrifood processing, energy equipment and data infrastructure, with selected parts of the semiconductor value chain as a longer-term prize.
India deserves a chapter of its own. TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HCL, Genpact and Dr. Reddy’s already give the relationship a solid base, but it remains largely a services story. The next step is to move India–Romania ties from delivery centres to production lines, and to present Romania to Indian manufacturers as their entry point to European regulation, customers and supply chains.
The honest caveat
Credibility requires saying what does not yet work, and an international audience will notice if we skip it.
In 2021, Haier opened near Ploiești its first refrigerator factory in the EU, an investment of more than €70 million. By early 2025 the group had decided to shut production there, citing weak European demand and a consolidation of its manufacturing footprint. The plant was later put up for sale and the state aid was recovered. Causes were partly global, but the case is a useful warning: Romania has the ingredients of an Asian manufacturing platform, not yet the full ecosystem.
The gaps are well known. Motorway and rail links remain incomplete, regional disparities are stark, administrative speed is uneven and skilled labour is tightening. None of this disqualifies the country. It does mean that the second wave will not arrive by itself. It has to be engineered.
That means treating Asian investors as long-term partners rather than as ribbon-cutting opportunities. It means permitting timelines that a Korean or Japanese board can plan around, industrial land that is ready rather than promised, energy contracts with visibility beyond one electoral cycle, and vocational pipelines built together with the investor. And it means supplier development programmes that turn one flagship plant into dozens of Romanian subcontractors, as Hanwha’s localisation model begins to show. A single factory is an investment. A supplier base is an ecosystem, and ecosystems are what keep capital from leaving when the cycle turns.
The second industrial wave
Twenty-five years ago, Western European companies helped turn Romania into one of their key manufacturing platforms. That wave reshaped whole regions, from Mioveni to Timișoara and Cluj.
The Asian century now opens the possibility of a second wave, larger and more diverse than the first, and more strategically consequential for Europe as a whole.
Bucharest’s ambition should not be to attract one more factory. It should be to make Romania Asia’s next factory in the European Union.
By: N. Peter Kramer