Executive Summary

Romanian organically certified market

In Romania, the certified organic market has been slowly growing over the past few years. However, given the lack of available data regarding the market structure, this research aims to fill the knowledge gap by revealing the characteristics of the organic market in Romania during 2012-2014, the main external factors that influence the organic operators, and the business performance of organic companies.

Risks and benefits

The thesis begins with highlighting the risks and benefits of organic agriculture, and critiques and improvements of the third party certification system. A first practical contribution of the research results is a scoring system, meant to reduce the transactional risks for the potential trading parties on an online trading platform for organic agricultural products.

Certification process

After explaining the certification process for a Romanian operator, the research focuses on detailed analysis of the supply side of the market, meaning the geographic distribution of the organic operators, type of legal entities, and the permanence of the operators in the certified organic system.

E-commerce

Moreover, for a sample of 50 e-shops selling organic products and analysis was performed in order to facilitate some strategic decisions for a manager.

Additionally, for a sample of 410 certified organic companies the business performance was analysed based on two financial indicators: return on assets and profit margin.

Overall, this thesis brings unique results, both practical and academic.