We Conducted an Interview with Çağrı Bülbül

Interview with Çağrı Bülbül Bestek Sales and Operations Manager Çağrı Bülbül provided information in our interview about the products and sales activities they offer in the adhesives and sealants sectors.

Could you briefly tell our readers about yourself and your professional background?

Hello, I am Çağrı Bülbül. I am Sales and Operations Manager at Bestek Endüstri. I hold a Bachelor's degree in International Relations from Bilkent University and an MBA from Bilkent University. I have been working in sales for 17 years. After spending the first 5 years of my career in the petroleum sector, I entered the world of industrial adhesives and tapes, where I have been for the past 12 years. At leading and innovative companies in the sector, tesa tape and 3M, I worked in sales engineering, key account management and sales leadership. Although my education is in business management, working in a field that involves chemistry and engineering has been and continues to be a unique experience. Under the Bestek umbrella, we have a portfolio of complementary products like puzzle pieces, so I can say we work for many markets, particularly defense industry, aerospace, automotive, white goods, construction, solar and furniture. In this capacity, I have an opportunity to learn something new every day and develop myself together with our stakeholders.

Could you provide information about Bestek's establishment process and areas of activity?

Bestek was founded in 2004 by our General Manager Özgür Ertekin in Ankara. We initially started as a distributor of 3M's Occupational Health and Safety products and became a distributor of the adhesives and tapes division a few years later. Because we were established in Ankara, we have extensive coverage across Anatolia. As our company grew over time, we opened an office in Istanbul four years ago due to emerging business opportunities. For this reason, since 2018 we have been able to serve all of Turkey, selling the products in our portfolio from Istanbul to Trabzon, from Izmir to Adana, from Ankara to Antalya in every corner of Turkey. We currently operate in an approximately 2,000 m² facility in Ankara, conducting manufacturing activities such as tape transfer, cutting and converting operations, converting semi-finished materials into finished products. Together with our management offices in Ankara and Istanbul, we work toward becoming closer to our customers and responding more quickly and effectively to their demands and needs. We distribute products from 5 different brands across Turkey. As business partners with 3M, Lohmann, Fischer, Weicon and Enimac, we continue our operations in every area where production and industry exist, with temporary or permanent tapes, adhesives and joining applications for assembly, fastening, masking, surface protection, insulation and filling.

Could you provide information about the products and services offered by Bestek? What sectors are among your target markets?

In addition to 18 years of 3M distributorship, our company began expanding its product range in 2021 through new partnerships and started approaching customers with a complete package. Specifically, in addition to 3M's adhesives and tapes, electrical and electronics, building and architecture and defense and aerospace product groups, we distribute Lohmann's double-sided mounting tapes—a 170-year-old German company—and Fischer's adhesives, chemicals and steel anchors, anchoring materials and passive fire protection products, also a German firm. Most recently, we concluded a distribution agreement with Weicon, another German company, adding to our portfolio a wide range of products including structural adhesives from the Weicon product group, thread-locking fasteners and sprays from the anaerobic product group. Being so active in the tape sector, we also began working as Turkey's sole distributor of tape lamination machines from Italian company Enimac, which produces solutions specifically for the easy and quick application of tapes to boxes, packages, envelopes and similar packages. We have been selling Enimac machines for approximately two years. With this product range, the sectors we serve are very diverse and I can say there is almost no market we have not entered. With the ISO EN9120 aviation certification we received in 2021, I must say we differentiate ourselves from our competitors in this field. Given this, one of the most important areas for us became defense industry and aerospace. Fortunately for us, in Turkish defense industry, aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, armored vehicles, ships, weapons, and just about any machine and material you can think of—we have contributed somewhere in many of them. Besides this, we supply products and services to some of Turkey's largest companies, particularly white goods manufacturers, renewable energy producers, automotive and rail systems prime manufacturers and subcontractors, and many other sectors from furniture to outdoor advertising, from lighting to power sources, to electrical and electronics equipment manufacturers. Since our company largely serves industrial end users, we try to understand manufacturers' needs, select product groups that can most effectively and efficiently address those needs, participate as much as possible in our customers' or prospective customers' R&D and engineering activities, conduct trials and applications with our products, and then work to procure the products decided upon by the customer in the fastest and most cost-effective manner possible. With this business model, Bestek can be described as a company that has the identity of a solution provider and problem solver rather than a mere sales firm, and has set growth as its goal in this manner.

Could you inform us about your domestic and international sales activities? What types of products do you export to which countries and regions?

We have three regional management departments—Anatolia, Marmara and Aegean—and we provide services to provinces within these regions. Domestically, we supply products to many cities in our country. However, we have long desired to work with international markets but, due to our business model, we had no exports until the past two years. As of 2021, we began supplying our tape and adhesive products in our neighboring geography. We have commenced export activities in adhesives and tapes specifically with Azerbaijan, Israel and Georgia. Obviously, in the coming period our goal is to increase the number of these countries.

Could we receive information about the innovation and R&D activities you carry out at Bestek?

We determine our innovations entirely based on customer needs. Following requests from our customers, we completed sourcing tape lamination machines and transfer machines. Now we have a machine fleet that can not only perform straight-line cutting but also transfer products at the same time and convert tapes into double-protected form. Although the pandemic caused us to postpone some of our plans slightly, in the near term we want to direct ourselves to an area where we have not been particularly active so far with investment in a slit-rewinding machine. In the meantime, we are working on some innovations not only on the production side but also on the sales side. We are implementing certain partnerships related to order aggregation through customer management systems and online sales activities.

What are among Bestek's future investment plans? Would you share your investment priorities with our readers?

First of all, we want to increase the number of employees. We are expanding our team to better serve our current customer portfolio and reach new customers more quickly. We have already begun work to add new team members in the Anatolia Region and Marmara Region. I believe the greatest investment is investment in human resources; people are the company's window to the outside world. For this reason, I can say the investment we place the most importance on is our employees. On the other hand, we completed the patent process with our Bestech brand and production and sales processes with our own brand will begin in Q3 2023. This will be a major step for us. Besides this, there is something we always say: growth continues as long as you export. We believe in the importance of exports for both Bestek's and our country's healthy growth. For this reason, among our investment plans are expansion of our current facility and development of our machine fleet. All of these plans are essentially based on being able to export to more countries. We are particularly interested in Turkic republics and African countries and we observe there are greater business opportunities in certain regions in these geographies. By optimizing production efficiency and innovation, and optimizing the thousands of products we currently have, identifying products that can be exported abroad, we will focus on export activities specific to these products.