Sustainable Solutions Making a Difference in Paint Formulations: YUKA Kimya

Report: Murat Soygür

Founded in 2019, YUKA Kimya stands out as a solution partner that provides customers with technical expertise, application experience, and support in product development processes alongside raw material supply. In the report we conducted, YUKA Kimya Founder Hüseyin Şahin shared valuable insights on numerous topics shaping the coatings sector, including artificial intelligence and digitalization.

Could you briefly tell us about yourself and your professional background?
I am the founder of YUKA Kimya. After completing my undergraduate studies in the Chemistry Department, I pursued postgraduate studies in polymer science and technologies. I began my professional career in 2010 as an R&D Specialist at Denge Kimya, where I served as R&D Specialist, R&D Manager and Product Manager until 2018.

During this period, I focused particularly on the development of silicon-based polymers and functional additives. While I worked on R&D projects related to textile chemicals in my early career years, I devoted my last four years entirely to developing raw materials for the paints and coatings sector. During this period, I was part of the team that played a role in establishing the DENSURF brand and conducting product development work.

In 2018, I took on the role of Product Manager for the DENSURF brand, managing product management, technical positioning and market introduction processes for paint additives, silicon resins and other specialty performance chemicals. This experience spanning from R&D to product management enabled me to combine my technical knowledge with the sector's needs.

Today at YUKA Kimya, we work with the same perspective. Rather than being merely a raw material supplier to our customers, we aim to offer an approach that embraces a long-term solution partnership philosophy, contributing to R&D processes through our technical expertise and application experience.

Could you tell us the founding story of YUKA Kimya?
My last position at Denge Kimya was Product Manager for the DENSURF brand. During this period, I was actively involved in developing the brand's sales channels, positioning products in the market and conducting technical work with customers. This gave me the opportunity to get to know many paint manufacturers in Turkey closely, and to directly observe their needs and expectations in the sector.

I had actually been thinking about establishing my own company for many years. The experience I gained during my Product Manager period showed me the right timing and business model to realize this goal. The most important need I observed in the field was not merely a distributor supplying raw materials, but a true solution partner offering technical expertise, application experience and support in product development processes.

With this vision, we founded YUKA Kimya in 2019. Since our establishment, our core objective has not been to be merely a supplier to our customers, but to be a technical solution partner working together with R&D teams, contributing to formulation development processes, matching the right raw material with the right application, and establishing long-term business partnerships.
We operate with the same understanding today; we share field feedback from our customers with our suppliers, contributing to new product development initiatives, and continue to bring innovative solutions suited to the sector's changing needs to Turkey's coatings sector.

What product groups stand out in YUKA Kimya's portfolio? What are the main advantages these products provide to customers?
The foundation of YUKA Kimya's product portfolio consists of DENSURF branded paint additives. With dispersing agents, foam control agents, silicon-based surface additives and high-temperature-resistant silicon resins, we provide solutions for a wide range of applications from decorative paints to industrial and protective coatings. Our core objective in these product groups is to improve production processes while increasing the performance of the final coating and providing paint manufacturers with an optimal cost/performance balance.

Our portfolio also includes VYNAX branded polyurethane dispersion (PUD) resins from Denge Kimya. The specialized water-based resins developed by VYNAX are capable of providing mechanical strength, chemical resistance and surface performance in many applications such as wood, metal, glass, plastic, leather, building chemicals and floor coatings that classical acrylic dispersions struggle to achieve. Considering the increasing demand for environmentally friendly and high-performance water-based systems, we believe this product group will become even more important in the coming years.

Additionally, we have incorporated functional silanes that improve surface modification and adhesion performance into our product portfolio. Our fundamental approach in building our portfolio is not simply adding new products, but bringing raw materials to the sector that can truly make a difference in paint manufacturers' formulations, have high technical added value and offer sustainable solutions.

In recent years, the DENSURF product family has expanded significantly, especially in the high-value paint additives segment. New-generation high-molecular-weight products such as DENSURF DA 4010, DA 4030, DA 4040 and DA 4115 were added to the portfolio in the dispersing agents group. In addition to showing high compatibility with different resin systems, these products provide effective dispersion performance with both organic and inorganic pigments, offering important advantages in terms of color development, storage stability and process efficiency.

The DENSURF HR 800 and DENSURF HR 900 series in the high-temperature-resistant silicon resins group, which have been successfully used for many years, have been further developed with new-generation products suited to different curing conditions and application needs.

In the foam control agents group, our product range has been expanded particularly for micro-foam control and air release, while on the surface additives side, DENSURF SM 111 has become one of our new-generation products standing out in the short term with characteristics such as scratch resistance, surface slip and gloss retention.

For us, product development is never a completed process. We combine field feedback from our customers with the experience of our R&D teams and pass it on to our suppliers; in this way, we continue to contribute both to the improvement of existing products and to the emergence of new technologies the sector will need in the future.

How do you assess the position of the DENSURF brand in the Turkish market and the competitive advantages it provides?
DENSURF stands out today as one of the reputable domestic brands in Turkey's coatings sector, with a strong R&D infrastructure and technical approach. The foundation of this success lies not only in developing high-performance products, but in closely monitoring the sector's changing needs, continuously improving its product portfolio and being able to respond quickly to customer expectations.

Today, paint manufacturers are no longer merely looking for a high-performance product. Along with this, criteria such as supply continuity, technical support, cost optimization, sustainability and rapid access to new technologies also carry great importance in decision-making processes. DENSURF, with its wide product range suited to different resin systems, strong performance/price balance and continuously evolving R&D work, is positioned as a brand capable of meeting these expectations.

I believe one of the most important features that sets DENSURF apart is its dynamic nature. Feedback from the field and changing customer needs are rapidly reflected in product development processes. In this way, existing products are continuously improved while new-generation additives can be brought to market in shorter timeframes. This agility creates an important competitive advantage in today's rapidly changing coatings sector.

Our role as YUKA Kimya is not merely to deliver this strong product portfolio to our customers, but also to support it with correct technical expertise. A product's success depends not only on the performance it achieves in the laboratory, but on its ability to be applied in harmony with the customer's production process, the resin system they use and the final performance they target. For this reason, we work together with our customers' R&D teams, providing technical support from product selection through application optimization, aiming to be a true solution partner.

Today, I believe the fundamental reason DENSURF is preferred in Turkey is not merely that it delivers quality products, but that it can provide R&D strength, technical approach, continuously evolving product portfolio and customer-oriented collaboration understanding under one roof.

What do you think about the impact of artificial intelligence and digitalization on paint formulation development processes?
I believe artificial intelligence and digitalization will be among the most important transformation areas in the coatings sector in the coming years. However, artificial intelligence should not be viewed as technology that will replace R&D experts or chemists; rather, when used correctly, it should be seen as a powerful assistant that accelerates R&D processes, enables better decision-making and makes institutional knowledge accumulation more effective.

When evaluated from the perspective of raw material manufacturers, artificial intelligence will provide significant contributions in many processes such as literature and patent searches, new raw material research, analysis of technical data sheets, comparison of different chemical structures and creation of experimental designs. Especially when developing a new dispersing agent, foam control agent, surface additive or resin, systematic analysis of past work and ability to evaluate different approaches quickly will enable R&D teams to work much more efficiently.

From the paint manufacturers' perspective, I believe the most significant contribution of artificial intelligence will be the ability to effectively evaluate formulation and performance data accumulated over years. Today, many paint manufacturers have thousands of formulas in their databases, the raw materials used in these formulas and their physical, mechanical, chemical and application performance results. When this data is properly digitalized and analyzed by artificial intelligence, systems can be developed that learn from past experience and can recommend the most suitable raw material combinations for a specific performance target.

For example, when higher scratch resistance, lower VOC, better pigment stability, faster drying, higher corrosion resistance or cost optimization are targeted, artificial intelligence can analyze thousands of past experiments and predict which resin, additive and pigment combinations are more likely to succeed. In this way, R&D teams can reach conclusions with fewer experiments in shorter timeframes, accelerating product development processes and making them more efficient.

In my view, one of the most important transformations artificial intelligence will bring is changing the way R&D professionals work. Literature searches, patent reviews, alternative raw material research and technical data comparisons that previously took days or even weeks can now be accomplished within hours. Summarizing technical papers, comparing products from different manufacturers, creating experimental plans and interpreting experimental results—in many such processes, artificial intelligence will enable R&D experts to work much faster and more efficiently.

In the future, one of the important competencies distinguishing R&D experts from one another will be the ability to use artificial intelligence effectively. Just as engineers who effectively used advanced analytical instruments, simulation software or laboratory automation stood out in the past, in the coming period R&D professionals who use artificial intelligence correctly will be able to access far more technical information, evaluate far more alternatives and make far more accurate decisions in much shorter timeframes. Thus, researchers will be able to spend less time on routine information gathering and analysis processes and more time developing innovative ideas, interpreting experimental results and generating solutions that will provide added value to their customers.

Nevertheless, paint formulation remains an engineering discipline requiring experience. The same raw material can produce completely different results when the resin system, pigment type, process conditions and application method change. For this reason, the recommendations provided by artificial intelligence must be validated through laboratory work, technical expertise and field experience. Artificial intelligence will be a technology that makes experience more efficient, not a technology that replaces experience.

At YUKA Kimya, we evaluate digitalization not only on the technical side but across all our business processes. We actively benefit from digital systems in areas such as tracking sales processes, recording customer visits, sample and project management, monitoring opportunities, analyzing customer needs and supporting workflow automation. Our aim is not to leave information generated in the field as merely individual experience, but to transform it into institutional memory and use it to provide customers with faster, more accurate and higher-value-added solutions.

In the coming years, competitive advantage in the coatings sector will not be gained solely through access to better raw materials, but through the ability to generate information faster, analyze it correctly and use it effectively. Artificial intelligence will be one of the most important tools for this transformation. However, people will ultimately create the real difference. R&D experts who use artificial intelligence correctly will become professionals capable of developing more alternatives in shorter timeframes, making more accurate decisions and providing higher-value-added solutions to their customers. I believe the successful companies and engineers of the future will be those who can use artificial intelligence most efficiently together with human experience.