40 YEARS

The year is 1982. Communist Romania’s most difficult decade begins, with an international debt crisis and savage austerity program rippling through the economy. But against the background of grisly economic and political news, the first iteration of RAAL (then state-owned IUT) churns out the unthinkable: radiators developed in-house for the latest generation of military jets and armored vehicles of the Warsaw Pact. Soon afterwards, a Citroen plant manufacturing locally under the brand name Oltcit sources its radiators from Romania. At the center of this economic miracle was the current CEO of RAAL, dr. Paul Ilies, whose PhD thesis have birth to IUT’s first generation cooling systems.

The 1980s were a decade of research isolation and extreme deprivations in the area of imported technology. Yet despite this our “ancestor” prospered, with wind in its sails from a a determined team of engineers trained in the elite research programs of the state. It was the same engineers that broke new technological barriers during that grim decade that became the founders of RAAL in the early 1990s, when the plant was privatized and its employees became the shareholders. Again, RAAL stuck out through the postcommunist quagmire: even as other MEBO privatizations stalled, RAAL’s worked, thanks to the massive investment in its R&D unit, which remains the largest among domestically owned manufacturing firms.

As Romania was getting close to EU membership, RAAL experienced its own version of the “Roaring Noughties,” with a massive expansion of its plants, rollover and employment. Emboldened by this world historical opportunity, RAAL scaled up what it had been best at since its exception: a pioneer for the efficient mobility of tomorrow as well as a good citizen in the Bistrita community that nurtured its prosperous trajectory. Yet again, even as many European economies were devastated by the Great Recession of 2008-2011, RAAL’s expansion and innovation capabilities reached new heights during the past ten years, turning it into an important part of European supply chains in automotive.