paintistanbul & Turkcoat Virtual Congress Draws Strong Interest

paintİstanbul & Turkcoat 2021 Virtual Congress on Organic Coatings, Polymers and Related Materials drew strong participation. paintİstanbul & Turkcoat 2021 Congress on Organic Coatings, Polymers and Related Materials hosted visitors in a virtual environment between 8-9 December. The Virtual Congress proceeded over two days with 2 opening remarks and 10 sessions, featuring a total of 31 oral presentations and 17 poster presentations from speakers participating domestically and internationally. At the Congress, scientists from universities, research institutes and industry shared their research findings and reflected the state of technological advancement achieved in certain fields globally.

Major success at virtual congress

The Virtual Congress opened with remarks from İKMİB Board Chairman Adil Pelister, Bosad Board Chairman M. Akın Akçalı, Bosad Board Member and Fair and Congress Working Group Chairman Hakan Ünel and Congress Scientific Board Chairman Dr. Engin Çörüşlü. The virtual congress, organized by the Paint Manufacturers Association (Bosad), was supported by İKMİB as main sponsor and BASF as registration sponsor. Seventeen companies from the sector's valued stakeholders also sponsored the congress. The paintİstanbul & Turkcoat Virtual Congress, the sole international congress of our paint sector, achieved major success with participation from 804 viewers domestically and internationally.

Sectoral information provided

The paintİstanbul & Turkcoat Virtual Congress covered all processes this year regarding nanoparticles, nanostructures, functional coatings, testing and analysis, sustainable technologies, new raw materials and decorative paints in the paint sector; presentations prepared by experts in the field were shared, providing information on the most current knowledge and latest technologies in the sector. İKMİB Board Chairman Adil Pelister stated that they are working with all their strength to contribute to the chemistry sector from supply processes to production, from logistics processes to innovation and exports as the output of all these. Pelister emphasized that the most important factor for the country's economy to achieve sustainable growth is to increase scale in the economy, and that this requires broadening our portfolio of high-technology and high-value-added products as a country.

"We must focus on high targets"

Pelister said, "In order to grow our sector and our country's economy and elevate it to the global scale it deserves, we must certainly focus on high targets. As İKMİB, we have set our 2030 target as USD 40 billion in chemical exports. We are targeting high-technology and high-value-added products that are equivalent to the new digital green economic principles we are pursuing." he said. Pelister also announced that the Chemistry Technologies Center, which will include reference laboratories with international accreditations, an R&D Center, and a digital library, will be opened in 2022 to provide our sector with the opportunity to produce new and high-technology products.

"Turkish paint sector serves as a bridge"

Bosad Board Chairman M. Akın Akçalı said, "The Turkish paint sector, holding a share of 1.5-2 percent of the global paint market, also serves as a bridge between Europe, Asia and Africa by virtue of its geographical location. Both in terms of production technology and product quality, we can measure ourselves with producers from anywhere in the world and even transfer know-how; we experience this as industrialists with our own brands even in the most challenging markets we have entered, and we take pride in the level we have reached." he said.

paintİstanbul & Turkcoat Fair is critically important

Akçalı said, "We expect our exports to record growth in the 20 percent range by volume at the end of this year. At this point, I believe that the paintİstanbul & Turkcoat Fair, which is carried out with the participation of national and international paint, raw material, production equipment and packaging manufacturer companies, is critically important for growth in export markets. Our fair, which we have not been able to hold for 2 years due to the pandemic, will be held with Artkim Fuarcılık A.Ş. with Covid-19 precautions between 17-19 March 2022 at the Istanbul Fair Center." he said.

"It is being shaped in the light of science, research and development"

Bosad Board Member and Fair and Congress Working Group Chairman Hakan Ünel said, "Our aim is to position our congress as one of the most recognized and followed events globally in its field while contributing to the vision and knowledge of our sector. Our sector, operating at the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa, will see its importance and potential increase further in the coming years with correct strategies. The complementary international congress and fair cycle will undoubtedly be one of the most important cornerstones of this development." he said. Ünel continued, "Once again we understood that the future is being shaped in the light of science, research and development. Only in this way can we as the paint sector achieve the economic results we are targeting. For this very reason, we must make efforts to elevate the level of our congress higher each time." he said.

"Research is a matter of tradition"

Bosad Congress Scientific Board Chairman Dr. Engin Çörüşlü, noting that the only way to differentiate in exports is to design products with unique or superior properties that can provide high added value to customers and be produced and marketed, said the following: "In other words, the goal is to create new products with a high level of innovation. Companies have a tool that can provide this opportunity—R&D Departments capable of conducting quality research. R&D Departments are departments requiring very important infrastructure. I am not speaking of buildings and equipment here. What we are essentially talking about is highly qualified researchers. Research is also a matter of tradition. In our country, it is quite recent that research and researchers have moved outside universities and begun to organize within companies. The R&D incentive law was published in 2008. Nevertheless, I believe it is possible for us to close the gap in tradition with our highly qualified workforce. Here, we need young people who are very well-trained, educated throughout their entire educational life from primary school through university not on the basis of obedience to authority and belief, but on the basis of science, critical reason and free thought. To be innovative, we need researchers who can put forward marginal, unconventional, unusual thoughts, who have the courage to ask important questions and seek answers to them, and who can take risks. If we do not have researchers of this quality, we can make only small innovations through imitation, but these will not provide the level of increase in unit prices that we seek. This is quite certain. We must not forget this either. A risky project is in a sense a risky investment, because risky projects are projects with relatively low chances of success. They are like diving into deep waters that have not been traversed before, waters not yet well known, and therefore risky. On this matter, our company partners and senior managers, like our researchers, need to be able to take risks, and they need to be able to accept that 0-15 percent of research projects be allocated to risky projects with low chances of success. The success risk of these projects is high, but if successful, the returns are also high. Companies that prioritize research and can ensure the creative and aspiring work of their researchers will have high competitiveness, and only such companies can move forward confidently into the future."