President Emil Constantinescu at CERF'99

In 1986, when Prince Charles opened Laser-Scan the first company on the Cambridge Science Park - little could he have known that twelve years later he would be visiting the son of Laser-Scan in Romania. For Geo Strategies is a true "Cambridge Phenomenon" company. When Nick Segal identified the Cambridge Phenomenon in 1985, the furthest outpost was Ciba Geigy in Duxford. Geo Strategies now extends the concept to Transylvania some 1,170 miles away. Geo Strategies was set up by Bill Metcalf (an international management consultant and former managing director of Laser-Scan), and Daniela Florea (formerly a geography teacher from Sibiu in Romania). The first employee joined in September 1994 and, in four short years, the company has become a major force in the world mapping community with a staff of 58.

Daniela Florea - CEO of Geo Strategies - has recently been elected to the Board of IMTA (the International Map Trade Organisation). She says "This is a real recognition of the part we now play in world mapping. We have produced data sets for 43 countries around the world - they are used by NEC in Japan, LG in Korea, Motorola in the USA, TIWS in Canada, Ordnance Survey in the UK, France Telecom, Italian Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, Ericsson, Nokia and many others. We are not yet a Fortune 500 company, but many of our users are in precisely that category."

Geo Strategies specialises in map data sets for the burgeoning GIS (Geographic Information Systems) industry. This allows users to portray map information on computers for market analysis, customer profiling, logistic planning, strategic analysis - in fact anywhere that spatial data is required. During 1998, Geo Strategies has set up a Survey Division with technical support from Ordnance Survey, and also an Image Processing Division with input from NRSC (the National Remote Sensing Centre) located in Farnborough. Results from these two activities will come through next year. However, the company doesn't yet produce any paper maps

According to Florea "This is a great challenge. We set ourselves up to be a data producer - to produce digital data to enable other people to produce maps. We have, however, grown to become the largest independent mapping organisation in central and Eastern Europe and are constantly being asked for paper maps of the region. It becomes inevitable that we will have to extend our activities to printing and publishing paper maps and atlases in the not too distant future. As our other initiatives take off, publishing will require my attention. There never seems to be an end to initiative and creativity. It's all very hard work, but it is also so very rewarding to see our initial vision turn into reality". "Both the British Embassy and the DTI have been very supportive of our initiative. It is magnificent to receive a visit from Prince Charles as, in some sense, this recognises what we have achieved as an extension of British Industry. We are a British/Romanian Joint Venture company and, by proxy, I feel very much part of the British Business community."

Romanian Business Journal No 46, November 13-19 1999