Largest publicly traded Romanian tech company offers stock options to employees

AROBS Transilvania Software, the largest Romanian tech company listed at the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BVB), recently awarded 300 of its employees with stocks. The company’s Stock Option Plan is meant to transform employees into partners, motivating and keeping them on.

The program “is an element that distinguishes AROBS on the market, and can attract talented people with extensive expertise in the field who can contribute both to the growth of the software services for the global market, and the development of software products for the domestic market and not only. We hope, at the same time, that we will get our colleagues to become future investors on the Bucharest Stock Exchange,” said Voicu Oprean, founder and CEO of AROBS, cited by HotNews.

In October 2021, the majority shareholder, Voicu Oprean, transferred 10% of the shares to the company. As a result of the private placement and the capital increase, the company ended up owning a number of 80,202,758 shares, which represents 8.8% of the share capital.

During the first stage of the SOP program implemented by AROBS, in November 2021, free options were allocated to a number of approximately 300 employees within the AROBS group. Seniority of more than one year and exceptional results served as criteria for the allocation of options. A total of 3,040,396 options matured in November 2022 and were converted into shares.

In September 2022, AROBS launched SOP 2, allocating 35 million options. The group will also continue its share buyback program in the future, and aims to implement the SOP program annually.

The program is one of the few of its kind among medium and large IT companies in Romania. There are approximately 8 million European employees who own shares in more than 2,800 companies according to the 2021 annual report published by the European Federation of Employee Share Ownership.

(Photo source: AROBS on Facebook)