Investing in Moldova day 3 - Welcome to Softexpert

So today started with going to a meeting at Softexpert, Moldova's second animation company and see their business. The company is run by CEO Eugeniu Frimu and the entire team consists of 9 young and creative talents who did everything in-house with animations; drawings, videos, composing sound and music. Currently they are working on making a pilot episode for an animation series, believing that they will get good response and get the show picked up by a network. They were also involved with all kinds of jobs concerning animations, video creation and editing, and until the animated series gets picked up, they earn money on doing web design or doing tasks that are very time consuming for other animation companies. The CEO said that "Our passion is in drawing and making animations, because anyone can make a webpage, but to make animations you need a team of creative talents to focus on realizing a vision - and that's why animation is our passion".

After the meeting I went back to my office, contacted some more investors about STAR Coffee, and made a file about Softexpert, got some pictures of the team and tomorrow I will contact some gaming companies and animation companies, and see if they would like to partner up with Softexpert, or have some projects they could help out with. Lastly, I contacted a german supplier for an catering company called lunch express. The company believes they could earn more money if they got cheaper disposable cups, tableware, soup bowls, etc. than buying from their current supplier - and after seeing what they are paying I believe it can be done. The biggest expense though it transport and the tax (Moldova is still not a EU country so taxes on imports apply). So I got to spend some time on using Alibaba to try to find some producers - and to no surprise the chinese rule supreme in that category.

All in all, a very quiet day where I saw some more of Chisinau, and even had time for a local brewed beer at Beer House - the dark beer was very good, but their pilsner was not that great.

Anyway, I'll keep you updated. I've been told that my field visits to SME's outside of Chisinau is coming next week, and I might even go to Monaco to meet the chamber of commerce - exciting stuff :)

J