In our interview JRS Rettenmaier Turkey General Manager Mr. Emin Ergan answered our questions. Ergan gave information about the history and vision of JRS Rettenmaier.
Could you please briefly tell us about your educational and professional background?
I was born on February 25, 1983 in Şişli [Istanbul]. I am married with a child. I graduated from Department of Chemistry, Sakarya University.
Professionally, I have been working in the health sector for more than 17 years, first in R&D at some of the leading global and local manufacturers in the sector, and then in distributor companies, and as a manager in technical sales and business development departments.
I took part in the establishment of the Turkey office of the JRS Group in 2018, and I am currently the Managing Director at JRS Turkey.
[caption id="attachment_146395" align="aligncenter" width="391"]
JRS Rettenmaier Turkey General Manager Mr. Emin Ergan[/caption]
Could you please give information about JRS Rettenmaier Turkey’s history and milestones? What is the current structure of JRS Rettenmaier Turkey today? When JRS Rettenmaier Turkey started to operate in Turkey?
First, I would like to give brief information about JRS Group. With 140 years of experience, JRS Group is a global family company based in Germany and a global leader in the production of plant fibers in terms of both production capacity and sales volume, with more than 90 production facilities located around the world, including mainly in Europe, and America, China and India, new product development laboratories, sales offices and over 3500 employees.
The current CEO of the Group is Josef Otto Rettenmaier, a 4th-generation member of the family. Within the JRS Group, we have two main divisions, Life Science and Fiber Solutions, and there are 12 business units under these divisions.
These include pharmaceutical excipients and coatings, food ingredients, home and personal care, animal nutrition, modern materials, construction chemistry, filtration, functional asphalt additives, paper industry, natural smoking agents, plastics, and plant cultivation. In addition, we also have a functional and innovative animal care department for pets.
The establishment of JRS Turkey Office was officially completed in June 2018, and it started its commercial activities with the company title “Rettenmaier Turkey Doğal Elyaf Tic. Ltd. Şti.” in its first office at Acıbadem Akasya A1 Tower on the Asian side of Istanbul.
Due to the growth of the business in a short time and new colleagues hired for the new departments contributing to the increasing number of employees, we moved to a larger office at the same address, and our growth is currently continuing with an increasing momentum.
In the Turkey office, we have launched all Life Science and Natural Smoking departments of JRS Group, our parent company, and we serve our end-user customers with our wide service network.
The Turkey office imports products from our production facilities located mainly in Europe, as well as our production facilities in America, China and India, and collaborates with 4 different leading logistics and warehousing companies to deliver our products to end-user customers from stock to their factories.
To which industries and with what kind of products does JRS Rettenmaier Turkey mainly serve? Could you please give information about JRS Rettenmaier Turkey’s products, brands and services?
JRS Turkey Office strategically started operating with its Life Science departments. In fact, JRS products were distributed to end users in the relevant segments of the Turkish market for a long time through various distributors.
The establishment of our office enabled a smooth transfer of our existing business in the relevant sectors from the distributors to us and a direct contact line between end users and the manufacturer.
Except for some of the products of the business unit of pharmaceutical excipients and coatings, our products are 100% plant-based and are not harmful to human and natural life in any way; they are rather beneficial.
Our line of functional products include natural thickeners, disintegrate, carrier, bedding, natural fillers, calorie and fat reducers, anti-caking, viscosity regulators, and dispersing agent; in addition, we have multi-featured functional products.
We have different brands for our products in each division. We mainly use different varieties of the brand VIVAPUR for the Pharmaceuticals, Food Ingredients and Personal Care divisions, and different varieties of ARBOCEL for the Animal Nutrition division.
Could you please tell about your domestic and international sales activities? To which regions and what kind of products does JRS Rettenmaier Turkey mainly sell?
As I mentioned, JRS Turkey Office is a strategically established office as decided by the senior management, so we do have short- and long-term business plans and models.
Our priority is to integrate the products of all our divisions in the Turkish market in the short term and to have a leading position in the market, and, in the long term, we aim to build a complete infrastructure to be an office dealing with the markets of the Middle East and other neighboring countries.
Could you give information about JRS Rettenmaier Turkey ‘s environmental policy and sustainability approach?
We believe in a better future that is sustainable, and we do our part diligently. That’s why we, at JRS, are always innovative with our Plant Fiber technology to make nutritional
products healthier, pharmaceuticals more advanced, and industrial products more resource-friendly for a tomorrow worth living for.
Our high-quality functional plant fiber products are produced from natural, renewable raw materials, such as grain and fruit fibers, marine plants, wood and wood cellulose.
Our raw material selection and the entire processing are all environmentally friendly, and every single plant fiber we develop every day is dedicated to making the world more sustainable. Nature is the greatest inventor.
All you have to do is try harder and know how to better use the natural functions. And that’s exactly what we do. We use innovative JRS plant fiber technology to get the most out of nature without causing any harm.
We turn the numerous functions of these precious natural materials into holistic customized solutions for our customers around the world in almost all industries.
Could you please give information about JRS Rettenmaier Turkey’s innovation and R&D studies? Do you have any projects that were developed in the context of university - industry cooperation?
At JRS, nature is always our role model. We learn from it every day, focusing our research, development and production to offer its wide-ranging functional properties to industries in the form of innovative additives and semi-finished products. Following this principle, we
research and develop new products in our main R&D laboratory located in Germany, and provide practical support to academic studies at universities related to our licensed products that we have developed and discovered.
In addition, we provide formulation support in confidentiality for new products that our customers want to develop, and we provide significant support for various sectors to projects related to our trials in the pilot production facilities located in our R&D laboratory.
What are the priority criteria of JRS Rettenmaier Turkey when creating investment plans? Does JRS have any investment plans for near and far future?
At the Turkey Office, we are aware of the fact that having a strong company and strong product is an important advantage to be successful, but we also believe we need a team working together in harmony to maintain our success.
We consider our colleagues in our a family and believe that our biggest investment is to provide a comfortable, sustainable and people-oriented working environment.
In addition, we have short- and medium-term investment plans, as I mentioned, as a business model. It is among our goals to make Turkey a regional center in terms of production against the increasing shortage of raw materials and the problems experienced in supply, and to offer easing and safe solutions in terms of accessibility and distribution both for the large and developing domestic market of Turkey and for the markets of neighboring countries.
