1- Could you briefly tell our readers about yourself, your educational background and your professional background in the sector?
First of all, we would like to thank you for your interest. I graduated from Bilkent Business Administration Department and completed my master's degree in Marketing at Yeditepe University. I had worked in regional and country manager positions at the sales and marketing departments of many global companies such as FORD OTOSAN, NIKE Int., UPM. I have been working as Export Director at ALV Kimya since May 2019.
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Oğuzhan Semerci[/caption]
2- Could you tell us about your development process since the establishment of your company?
Our company is one of the group companies affiliated to URAS Holding and its field of activity is acrylic polymer production. ALV Kimya started its activities in 2014 with an annual capacity of approximately 45,000 tons in a 24,000 m2 production facility with a closed area of 17,000 m2 in Corlu. In 2014-2019, especially in the production of textile binders, our sales to our other group companies and the domestic market have been divided as 80% export, 15% group companies and 5% domestic market in May 2019. Currently, we export to more than 30 countries on 5 continents.
3- What are the products and product groups you offer to the paint industry? In which sectors are they mainly used?
For the construction industry; our production of interior and exterior acrylic paint binders constitutes 70% of our sales as of 2021. At the same time, we supply the construction chemicals industry with the acrylic binders we produce.
4- Could you tell us about your sales activities? Which regions do you mainly sell to?
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other Far Eastern countries such as India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam, which have become the homeland of the textile industry are our active and target markets for polymer and thickener production for textile. In addition, developing our activities in Egypt, Sudan and Mexico is among our 2021 second-quarter goals.
Our main markets in interior and exterior paints and construction chemicals are currently in all African, Middle Eastern and Arab countries, but our sales volumes in Western and Eastern Europe and Russia are rapidly increasing. Europe has a very important place in our medium and long-term sales and branding goals. For this reason, we strive to work mainly around a European centered strategy. Here, we aim to be one of the important players in the sector by using our logistics advantages along with our profitability targets.
5- Have you had an innovative paint product that you’ve presented to the sector recently?
In addition to our basic styrene-acrylic and pure acrylic paint binders, especially for the construction chemicals industry; we successfully launched our 50% and 57% styrene-based binders, whose productions require relatively more technical knowledge and know-how as of 2021. With the rapid development of the sales network of these products, I would like to state that we have started to differentiate positively from our competitors, especially in the European market.
6- Can you tell us about your after-sales services and customer satisfaction policies?
As ALV Kimya, all of our customers are business partners for us. Meeting the expectations of all our business partners and adding value to their business form the basis of our mission.
Being easily accessible for our existing and potential customers, providing very fast technical support when necessary, providing economical and sustainable solutions to our solution partners, being able to make a smooth trade operation from the order of the product to the delivery within the framework of total quality management as well as the standard product quality are the most important issues for us. We see the positive results of our customer satisfaction strategy, which we maintain within these principles, with our increased sales volume and high customer loyalty.
7- What are you doing to increase your brand awareness?
As ALV Kimya, our main goal is to be a global brand. All of our marketing strategies have been created in line with this goal.
We first started our branding efforts by updating our corporate identity and determining our brand idea. We started to explain our brand first to our colleagues, then to our business partners, potential customers and the industry press.
In addition, with the awareness that the digital world plays a decisive role in all areas of social life in today's conditions, we constantly update our website and actively use all our social media accounts in order to be transparent to our business partners and employees and to be in one-to-one communication.
8- What are your projects within the scope of new technological trends?
We aim to finalize our R&D and Application laboratories renewal project, which we started in 2020, within this year. We closely follow all product and final product-oriented technological developments in our sector with our state-of-the-art devices in both R&D and Application laboratories.
We keep ourselves up-to-date as a requirement of the technology era we live in with ongoing improvements we make in our production processes based on technology.
In addition, as ALV Kimya, we’ve given start to a powder polymer production facility addressing the building sector. We aim to offer a wider range of products to our customers by starting our activities in this field following our test productions that will start approximately 1.5 years later.
We aim to take our place in the global market with value-added products in the powder polymer business line, which has very serious potential, and to stand out in terms of market share with the necessary capacity increases in the medium-long term.
9- What does Industry 4.0 mean for you? What are your projects and studies related to this?
Industry 4.0 represents the intersection of industrial production and today's information technology for us.
As a company that has production facilities and closely follows technology, we aim to increase our productivity every day by perfecting our production thanks to our high-tech automation systems and technology investments we have made.
10- Have you made any new decisions while managing the pandemic process? What is your work in this context?
While the priority of our company management during the pandemic process was the health of our business partners and employees, both our business partners and we were informed in detail about all our processes and Covid-19 measures.
In order not to interrupt our communication with our current and potential customers throughout the process, we activated our crisis communication plan for a while within the scope of our brand communication plan.
We have started many new projects such as the development of our ERP-CRM programs, webinars where product-based or sectoral technical issues are discussed by accelerating the digitalization activities that we have focused on since we started our activities.
