Emre Özkurt
Calderys Sales Manager
The Covid-19 pandemic has profoundly affected the world, in terms of both health and economy. What are your general views on the effects of the pandemic?
Yes, unfortunately, we are experiencing a situation that affects almost all sectors socially and economically. No one predicted such an incident at the beginning of the year and it was deemed possible to experience such a global pandemic in the scenarios about the near future. However, while none of the companies added an item called Covid-19 while they were creating their 2020 budgets.
Now we have a new reality and it seems that it will not go away from our business life and private life for a while. It changed our ways of doing business and strategies and transformed 100 millions of people into digitalization, work from home, distance education in a very short time. I do not focus on how we adapt to all this, but on how we lived this transition in such a short time. While many of us are not distant from these technologies and are already using them, but it is incredible that they will be used so efficiently and it is mentioned that some habits in this process may be permanent even if the pandemic is over.
How have you been affected by this pandemic as a company? Have there been any changes in your goals in terms of turnover, sales, exports etc.?
The refractory sector has a structure that will not experience radical changes in 2-3 month periods considering the industries that we serve. However, if we come back from the final product stage to the raw material, of course, in the environment where the sales of commodities such as houses and cars decrease dramatically, the production amounts of the raw materials such as cement, steel, aluminum required for their production will decrease and therefore the consumption of our refractories used to produce this raw material will also decrease. We haven’t started to feel this effect right now and hopefully we will get through this without being affected by completing our normalization process.
How will be the new situation in the rest of the year and how will the sector be affected?
2019 was a year in which economic difficulties were experienced and therefore the desired numbers could not be reached. For this reason, we were looking at 2020 as a year of recovery and hoping that the capacity utilization rates will increase and the economy will start to get out of the point where it goes down, but unfortunately this pandemic process will cause economic figures which are worse than those of 2019. In the rest of the year, we will first see how normalized we can be and then we will try to complete the year in the best way according to our new normal.
What kind of restructuring and a process do you foresee as a company after Covid-19?
Actually, I would like to say that I predict that our normalization would continue without any problems and then everything would return to its previous form before the pandemic, but it is really hard to say anything clear. I think that it is necessary to act cautiously about how normalization will take shape as there are ambiguities like whether there will be a new wave of outbreak again, and that everyone will act like this at least until the end of the year. In addition, I am worried about some commentators’ speaking like we must now get used to living like this and the future would be like this as if the virus will never come out of our lives. I believe that the effects of this pandemic will be eliminated in the near future and we will talk about what a troubled 2020 we have lived in the future. Of course, this does not eliminate the risks of different outbreaks or disasters that may occur in the future. For this reason, we must learn good lessons from what we have lived and be prepared for the future.