A businessman and a traveler discovering new cultures
“Ukraine is definitely not an emerging market anymore. It’s already a developed country, but it has some fluctuation in the market,” said Glauco Verdoia, the CEO of GEM Ukraine. GEM (Global Emerging Market) Group, as Glauco explained, deals mainly with developing markets and has already opened offices for industrial and real estate projects in 17 countries all over the world, including the Middle East, North Africa and the Far East. Glauco noted that every country has different laws, different kinds of apartments and construction, and said that’s why “in 99 percent of the cases GEM looks for local partners and gets a shareholding with them – we never go into a project alone.”
During the first six months that the company has been operating in Ukraine, the key issue for Glauco had been to find very reliable and straightforward partners, which was eventually done. Having just started their business in Kyiv, the company is now planning to expand farther and cover some cities closer to the European border, naming as one of the reasons a difficult political situation in the capital. “In Ukraine, we are concentrating solely on projects concerning residential houses, retail offices and shopping centers, yet Sabre Capital, a part of GEM, is interested only in buying banks and now is looking forward to acquiring some Ukrainian banks,” Glauco explained.
Although he claims Ukraine is the country of opportunities, he stresses that it’s hard to introduce Western business practices to the local environment. “We want to do business differently from how the local developers do – we want to propose buildings that will be affordable and convenient at the same time,” Glauco said, stressing that the company is here not to “buy land, but to develop land.”
For Glauco, Ukraine wasn’t an absolutely new country. He already visited it four or five times before, during his work for an Italian company. Besides, he had already gotten used to traveling and facing absolutely new cultures and mentalities. He even stated that “I work in Kyiv and live in Rome,” where he goes once or twice a month. Glauco has lived the life of an expatriate for quite a long time in France, Australia, the US, and China, the latter being for him the hardest challenge. “Chinese people are very hard to negotiate with and gain trust from. Moreover, I was not in Beijing, not in Shanghai; I was in a country town of one and a half million people – still a very small city in China. There were around four or five white people in entire town,” he recalled.
In Ukraine, the difficulty for Glauco lies mainly in the sphere of business. The unstable political and economic situation still influences company decisions and makes it difficult to make long-term plans. As he argued, “Until there is straight legislation, it will be very difficult to look forward into very large projects.” In addition, it is very hard to get permission for starting a project from authorities.
Another obstacle for him is to find reliable and trustworthy partners. “It is difficult to understand the real nuances of what Ukrainians say, and sometimes we even consult after the meeting and ask each other, ‘So, what did he say?’” Glauco confided, laying the blame for such situations on the language barrier. Though he is learning Russian, it’s still difficult to have a conversation with Ukrainians. Glauco added smiling that not many people in Ukraine speak English well enough to communicate properly, and even less know Italian.
Actually, language is that part of a local culture that Glauco tries to absorb. Thus he knows French, English, Spanish and now a little bit of Russian. Yet with Chinese it didn’t work out. “In China, I really had no time for learning language, I was working 14 hours a day and always had a translator sitting on my shoulder,” Glauco recalled.
Now Glauco and his wife lead a very quiet life outside of work, mainly because they are still newcomers in the city and don’t know too many people from the international community at the moment. One of the brightest experiences they both named was a Ukrainian wedding, which they attended last autumn in Lviv.
“The wedding was very public – there were around 200 people and it lasted for 15 hours. We were the only foreigners but everybody was very friendly, we danced all night. Of course it was very different from our weddings, besides the house itself was very curious – the host was very fond of armory and weapons, which were all over the building,” Glauco recalled with a joyous smile.
Except for strolling around the city, hanging out in the nearby Decadence House and taking care of their three dogs, which are “a British bulldog, a hound and some mixed one,” Glauco and his wife are really fond of traveling. As he noted, each year they make a long trip and have already visited numerous enchanting places, each of which has its peculiar flavor. Yet among his favorites, Glauco mentioned Asian countries, as he “experienced the life of local people” there.
