Deniz Berna Sarsılmaz
Marketing and Business Development Manager
Keramik Makina
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?
The Covid-19 pandemic is a process that deeply affects the world in terms of both health and economy. The pandemic caused a decline in many areas, especially in the service sector. Apart from that, the pandemic has also led to a growth in the fields of food, hygiene, personal cosmetics and technology. This has been the first time after a long period when both the world and Turkey faced an enormous crisis and has created a compelling effect with regard to taking rapid actions in terms of both individuals and companies. With the pandemic while people changed their behavior in this context by prioritizing individual hygiene, firms have taken and continue to take actions by prioritizing the health of employees, expanding hygiene measures. When we look at consumer behavior, we find that there are serious changes after the pandemic. In this direction, the consumer, who prioritizes his health, started to change his consumption habits in this direction by deciding not to buy products without packaging.
On the other hand, especially in the early stages of the pandemic, there have been interruptions in the supply chain as the importing companies in Turkey could bring raw materials or semi-finished products from the countries like China, European Union countries and United States as these countries were deeply affected by the pandemic. In general terms, when the pandemic was analyzed on a sectoral basis, it provided advantages for some industries, while it caused serious disadvantages in some industries.
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.?
As Keramik Makine, we closely followed the pandemic as soon as it started to appear in the world. We created our crisis plan in this direction and we continue our production and works without any interruption by taking quick actions with the beginning of the outbreak in Turkey. First, we created new systems in our white collar and blue collar work areas with the aim of health and safety of our employees. We moved to the remote working system very quickly to minimize the risk for our white collar employees. With online meetings, we continue the process without any disruption. Considering that the contact and risk are more intense in blue collar and production areas, we have been able to carry out the process without any problems so far in cooperation with our health consultants and external support with the systems such as shift work and private work areas.
While some sectors grew in the Covid-19 period, there was a serious contraction in some sectors. The first behavior of the firms was to protect the current situation, as it was the first time that we encountered such a big pandemic crisis. I can say that the decision to suspend investments was a compelling factor in this sense. As we are a project company we had the opportunity to work without interruption thanks to the continuity of the projects we received last year and early in this year due. In our sales and export strategies, we will continue to support our business partners by providing sector-based focus areas with fast delivery projects in the light of our experience and innovation. By participating in virtual fairs in our business development processes abroad, we will continue our business development processes in foreign markets without interruption.
How will be the new situation in the rest of the year and how will the sector be affected?
It is obvious that the Covid-19 process, which deeply affects our country and the whole world, adversely affects the packaging industry and packaging machinery industry in many ways, but also leads to investments that will affect positively as packaging becomes important in terms of hygiene. It would not be correct to say that the sector is not affected by this process since packaging is in every area of our lives. There is a noticeable slowdown and suspended projects in sectors other than food, hygiene and cosmetics. Nevertheless, as I mentioned above, packaging has become a very important issue that will meet our needs such as safety, hygiene and health rather than a cosmetic need. We believe that this will further increase the need for packaging and packaging machinery.
What kind of restructuring and a process do you foresee as a company after Covid-19?
We are proceeding with confident steps considering that the Covid-19 process, which continues to lose its effect in the current period, will transform into the implementation of the projects and investment activities we have carried out in this period during the third quarter. We believe that the need for packaging machines, which provide added value to their businesses in the fast consumption, food and hygiene sectors, will increase with the accelerating strategic importance of packaging, especially with the new normal order, consumer habits. With remote and online platform meetings, we are creating new projects in terms of automating lines and developing packaging at the point of hygiene.
