Hüseyin ÖZKAN
Sintek Heavy Industries
Chairman of Board of Directors
Can you tell us about the establishment purposes and general fields of activity of Sintek Heavy Industries, which is a part of Sintek Group?
As you know, Sintek Madencilik Ltd. Şti., the flagship of Sintek Group, has accomplished several successful projects at home and abroad in a short period of time, and is a company that has established sustainable, long-lasting relationships with its customers and managed to become a solution partner, thanks to the quality and value-added works it has completed.
We established our Sintek Heavy Industries company in order to offer the experience and practice gained by the Sintek group, especially in cement industry projects, and our experiences in different sectors, to the service of investors in new projects.
We set out on April 20, 2020, by determining our target sectors as Energy, Iron-Steel and Environment investments, where our company managers have extensive experience and knowledge by taking part in many projects for several years.
You offer services in a variety of sectors and fields. There are many players in the industry as well. What are the aspects that differentiate you and enable you to be competitive?
First of all, I think it is necessary to evaluate the concept of “being competitive”. For us, being competitive isn’t always about doing business at the cheapest price.
Since the facilities we undertake are commercial enterprises that will produce for many years, the initial investment cost alone should not be the only competitive factor. Other factors that are as important as the initial investment cost while making a facility investment are that it has a reliable technology that will enable it to operate at the desired capacity without any problems, that it can offer the most appropriate costs by attaining the highest efficiency, and that it is made with the right materials and quality workmanship to ensure that the maintenance and renewal needs are minimal.
Choosing a company that can provide service at any time during and after the warranty period and will be by the side of the investor is also one of the important factors.
As a result of this understanding, we focus on engineering studies that will create added value in order to offer economical solutions as much as possible, while at the same time focusing on creating a sustainable corporate structure that can offer the elements I have just mentioned to investors.
In my opinion, being able to empathize with the investor, adopting solutions for her, answering the question “What would you expect if you were an investor” and producing solutions will enable us to become a competitive and accepted company.
We strive to make a difference by realizing the elements I described above and to leave a mark as we say in our company motto.
Sintek Group has completed projects abroad in countries such as Portugal, Sudan, Cameroon and Mozambique. As Sintek Heavy Industry, do you have a goal of completing projects abroad? What are the advantages or disadvantages of carrying out projects abroad?
As you know, as Turkish Contractors, we do business all over the world. As the Turkish Contracting sector, we have been in the top three in the world for the number of companies providing contracting services outside their own country for years.
As a group, we have subsidiaries and companies in the UAE, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, Ivory Coast and the Netherlands, which have been in service recently. We strive to add new references to the references we have created in many areas of the world.
The purpose of our overseas structuring is primarily to expand our market. Industrial investments in our country may not be at a level that will provide permanent job opportunities to our entire contracting sector, which is developed in terms of continuity and number. In this case, the search for a new market becomes inevitable. In this respect, one advantage of doing business abroad is that it helps to ensure the continuity of our companies.
Another benefit is that it enables us to keep the business methods, organization and quality standards of our company at levels that can do business on a world scale. This is essential for international competition.
Besides, I think that earning foreign currency to our country by doing business abroad is an important tool in terms of transforming the Turkish workforce and engineering into added value for our country.
You also closely follow new technologies, systems and applications in line with the areas you offer your services. When you look at the demands received from you, what is the process like?
Demand of investors is usually to catch the optimum point between CAPEX and OPEX costs. To achieve this, we closely follow technological developments and try to offer the most advanced technologies.
On the other hand, we are trying to develop our structural engineering solutions in order to reduce construction and assembly costs. These are activities that we are constantly trying to develop interactively while carrying out our projects. We follow the predictions and studies we conduct at the beginning of the project in detail during the implementation phase of our projects, and we constantly monitor what we can improve in the next project.
You are a company that produces turnkey projects on an EPC basis. Due to this structure, you design all the processes of a project from scratch to the end of the installation phase. What advantages does this offer for you and your customers?
This is a very important issue. Investors sometimes act with the strategy that they can complete the project more economically by breaking up the project more than necessary. First of all, we think that working with many companies by dividing into too many packages will be risky for the complete performance of the system in industrial plant investments where certain performance values are targeted. On the other hand, we believe that as the number of resources increases, the risks increase in terms of completing the work on time, on budget and with the required quality. The fact that more companies are involved in the business brings with it the necessity for the investor to follow the business with larger teams. Moreover, the investor takes the responsibility and risk of coordinating all companies in line with the same goals.
In terms of investment strategy, we do not recommend that investors who focus their concentration, business plans on production and sales and specialize in this field should take this responsibility and risk on themselves.
Are there any big and important projects that you have taken or will take recently?
As you know, as Sintek Group, we recently undertook the construction works of four different complex lots at Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Kentçim Cement Factory Equipment supply, Medcem Cement Factory 9.000 t/g new production line construction. We have recently signed the Coke Crushing and Screening plant construction contract of an important Iron and Steel plant. Apart from these, we have another project in the cement industry that has reached its final stage.
How did you experience 2021 in general? How will your goals and strategies for 2022 be shaped?
2021 has been a good year for us, in which we achieved our goals. We signed new projects in the cement industry. In addition, we have succeeded in obtaining significant jobs in the energy and iron and steel sectors, which we had set as our target a year ago. As a result of these, we have also succeeded in developing our staff and machinery-equipment park.
Of course, it is very important to take a project, but it is more important for us to be able to deliver the projects we take responsibility for properly. For this reason, our primary goal in 2022 is to realize the projects we have undertaken in the best way possible.
We will continue to follow new projects and develop business abroad in 2022 as well. In parallel, we will continue our efforts to expand and strengthen our staff and to continuously improve our business methods.