We had a pleasant interview with Evonik Sales Director Mr. Selim F. Kubat, Evonik Sales Manager Ms. Seza Yücel and Evonik Technical Manager Mr. Uğurcan İyidir. They gave information about Evonik’s working in the polyurethane sector.
03.12.2019
Mr. Selim could you please briefly tell us about yourself and Evonik?
After graduation from Chemical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University, and MBA at Koç University, I have been in the chemical industry for 16 years, 12 of those years at Evonik as Business Director. Evonik is one of the biggest chemical companies in the world, with around 13 billion Euro turnover and 32.000 employees. We claim that we are the biggest specialty chemical company in the world, producing thousands of products in more than 180 production facilities, serving the nutrition, consumer goods, health, agriculture, mining, construction, automotive, chemicals and plastics industries.
Could you please tell us about your sale activities in Turkey? Predominantly, which regions, do you focus on?
Evonik Ticaret has been active in Turkey for 33 years with sales, marketing, technical support and logistic activities. At the beginning, it was established to serve only the Turkish market but now many Evonik business lines are handling a bigger region from Turkey. Our comfort and insulation business line are one of these, handling the MENA region from Istanbul with 6 dedicated personnel.
Ms. Seza could you introduce yourself shortly and tell us Evonik’s activities and Products for PU industry?
After graduation from Chemical Engineering at Ege University, I worked in several areas like engineering, quality management and sales. I joined Evonik 4 years ago and am now working as Business Manager for our comfort and insulation business line. Since the 1980’s, under the umbrella of Goldschmidt, Degussa and Evonik, we are supplying the brands TEGOSTAB, KOSMOS, TEGOAMIN, ORTEGOL, GORAPUR and TEGOCOLOR to the local PU industry. After the recent acquisition in 2017 of the air products chemicals business, we enlarged our portfolio with the brands DABCO, POLYCAT and VERSALINK. With these strong brands, we are offering surfactants, catalysts, release agents and performance additives for the production of flexible, rigid, molded and high-density polyurethane foams.
Could we learn after-sales services and customer satisfaction philosophy of Evonik?
Our business model is based on four main components, high quality products, supply sustainability, fast logistics and ongoing technical support. We have more than 150 years of high-quality production experience, which is reflected in all our products. In addition to that, we try to be prepared for the raw material supply fluctuations, which is very common in the polyurethane industry. To adopt and benefit from the changes in our business package in the last two years (Air Products PMD acquisition and implementation of BEPs) we invested into our logistics team and infrastructure in Turkey. Finally, yet importantly, fast and reliable technical support is an important component of our package, which differentiates us from our competition.
Mr. Uğurcan could you introduce yourself shortly and tell us Evonik’s technical support activities?
I completed my bachelor and master’s degree in Gazi University’s Chemical Engineering Department and have been working in the polyurethane industry since 2007 and with Evonik since 2016 as Technical Manager. As a member of a global technical team, I am responsible for supporting our customers in their new product development, process improvement and daily production issues. Having polyurethane foam experience for around 60 years, active all around the globe with a big technical team, enables us to give fast and reliable technical support to our customers. To enhance this service in the region, we are building a polyurethane complex that will serve the market with a foam laboratory and training center in our Istanbul facilities. With this new extension, we will be offering much faster and wider service to the foam producers in MEA region.
What are the new trends and developments you are following and working on as Evonik?
One of the major topics facing the PU industry these days is to reduce the VOC content of the PU products as much as possible. At Evonik, we are already offering a wide variety of VOC optimized products to the market, but we continue working with well-known producers in the automotive, furniture and mattress industries to be ready to meet future, much more demanding VOC standards. In addition to this, we are also working to develop products, which will support our customers in the production of foams to be used in” Bed in Box” concepts.
