Romania risks remaining captive to a peripheral economic model, based on the export of raw resources and the import of finished products, in the absence of a strategy regarding the development of strategic industries and the internal valorization of natural gas, argues the president of the Smart Energy Association (AEI), Dumitru Chisăliță, in an analysis published on Sunday.
“For a long time, the plant or part of it was in storage, and the state behaved as if the halt in fertilizer production was just a passing economic news, not a strategic vulnerability. There was no serious strategy for the fertilizer industry. There was no mature debate about food security. There was almost no discussion about Romania’s dependence on imports in a world that has become geopolitically unstable. But now, suddenly, everyone is discovering the expression “national strategic objective”, the AEI president mentioned, according to Agerpres.
According to him, the agreement signed between Azomureș and Romgaz is only an agreement in principle. “Not a transaction. According to official communiqués issued in May 2026, the document signed between Romgaz and Azomureș is a Memorandum of Understanding/Heads of Terms. A possible transaction could be carried out in July 2026”, specifies Chisăliță.
In his opinion, if a state-owned company tries to buy something important, the accusation of “nationalization” immediately arises.
“Although, legally and economically, the term is completely wrong, nationalization means forced confiscation. Here we are talking about negotiation, evaluation and voluntary commercial transaction. Exactly the mechanism that works every day in a market economy. The fact that one of the buyers is a state-owned company does not automatically transform the transaction into a socialist act,” notes the AEI president.
Two completely different things are confused, namely “totalitarian control of the economy” and “strategic participation of the state in a market economy,” the specialist argues.
“The real issue is not whether the state participates in a strategic sector. The issue is whether it does so competently, transparently and in the public interest. (…) “Nationalization!” becomes a panicked label designed to close the conversation before it begins. Obsession with price without context. Equally predictable is the argument: “How can you now spend 100 million euros on something that was once sold for 10?” It is an economic slogan that seems devastating at first glance and completely empty upon second analysis. Because it ignores almost everything that matters: inflation, investments made in the meantime, existing infrastructure, reconstruction costs, strategic value, the fact that today’s industrial Europe is much harder and more expensive to build than two decades ago,” added Chisăliță.
The AEI president claims that Azomureș is not just about halls and pipelines, but also about energy infrastructure, logistics, rail access, chemical facilities, permits, know-how and a specialized workforce.
“All of this is worth enormously precisely because it is almost impossible to recreate quickly in today’s Europe. If someone were to try to build a similar plant from scratch today, the costs would probably run into billions. But Romania still judges 21st-century industry with the emotional reflexes of the transition of the 1990s. And this produces a fundamental confusion: many people believe that the symbolic prices of the privatizations of that time represented the “real value” of the assets. In reality, the state was simply trying to get rid of companies it could no longer support, and investors were assuming huge risks and modernization obligations,” Chisăliță emphasized.
He mentions that the value of a strategic asset is given by “what it can produce today and how difficult it can be replaced.”
“There is another collective reflex: “the Romanian state is not capable of developing anything.” The last decades provide sufficient arguments for this distrust: companies politically captured, management changed after each electoral cycle, delayed investments and failed projects. And yet, precisely because the rule seems so solid, it is worth noting the exceptions. Romgaz is one of them. Not because it is perfect or immune to political influence, but because it has good management and has thus managed, remarkably for a state-controlled company, to operate with normal economic logic”, the AEI president also said.
The specialist claims that the investments in Neptun Deep and the company’s positioning at a critical moment for European energy security show “something rare in the Romanian landscape”, namely the ability to think strategically in the long term, and this dismantles “a convenient prejudice: state ownership does not automatically produce incompetence”.
“The real problem is not only ownership. The problem is the quality of management, administrative stability and resistance to political pressures. There are incompetent private companies and efficient state-owned companies. The difference is made exclusively by the people who run them,” Chisăliță also said.
According to him, modern agriculture cannot exist without fertilizers, fertilizers without gas, and gas is no longer just an economic commodity, but “strategic security”.
“The biggest irony, however, remains the fact that Romania exports gas and imports fertilizers. That is, exactly the classic model of peripheral economies: you sell cheap raw materials and buy expensive finished products. Romania has gas, agriculture, an excellent regional position and a relatively developed energy infrastructure. And yet it continues to lose precisely the industries that multiply economic value. Because the great value does not lie in the resource. It lies in processing, industrial integration and control of the economic chain. Raw gas brings money. Gas transformed into industry brings: jobs, taxes, exports, regional influence, economic security”, considers the president of AEI.
In his opinion, Romania wants the results of a mature industrial economy with passive economy instruments.
“The question is whether Romania still wants to be an economy that produces something complex or whether it definitively accepts the role of a consumer market and exporter of raw resources. Then it must be understood that management is the minimum condition that makes the difference, and the Romgaz management has demonstrated this: when there is strategic discipline, execution capacity and managerial commitment, Romanian companies can once again become relevant industrial actors, not simple entities to enrich themselves. The problem is not the lack of resources, but the inability to build complete economic chains around them. Gas extracted here should mean industry here, added value here, well-paid jobs here. In the absence of this vision, Romania risks remaining captive in a peripheral economic model: it exports raw materials, imports finished products and constantly loses industrial capacity, know-how and economic autonomy”, added Chisăliță.