We Conducted a Pleasant Interview with Mr. Emrah Şenol

We had a pleasant conversation with Mr. Emrah Şenol, Managing Director of Netzsch Turkey. Emrah Şenol shared valuable information with our readers about the organization and services of Netzsch in Turkey. Enjoyable reading… Could you please tell our readers about yourself and your professional background? After graduating from DEU Mechanical Engineering Department in 2009, I started my professional career by pursuing an MBA at Ege University. I worked in the technical sales departments of companies operating in different sectors such as energy, sheet metal production and air conditioning. Subsequently, I was transferred to our company during the establishment of Netzsch Turkey. Could you please share with our readers the story of Netzsch's founding and the development process of its organization in Turkey? Netzsch is a company that was founded approximately 150 years ago in Selb, Germany, a region famous for porcelain production. Although it focused more intensively on the ceramic industry at its inception, it continues its global activities with approximately 5,000 employees, focusing on three main business units: "Analyzing and Testing", "Pumps and Systems" and "Grinding and Dispersing". Netzsch Turkey, on the other hand, was established in Izmir in 2013 under the "Grinding and Dispersing" business unit and serves Turkey and the surrounding markets. Could you please tell us about the sectors and product groups you serve? We serve many different sectors such as energy, chemicals, mining, cement, food, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. In fact, there is an application that we address in all items we use in our daily lives, from mobile phones to disinfectants, from the coffee we drink to the t-shirts we wear. In our grinding and dispersing business unit, we offer machinery and plant solutions for dry and wet grinding, classification, mixing and homogenization processes. As Netzsch Turkey, we provide technical sales, engineering, service and spare parts sales, as well as grinding media available from stock, from our Izmir center for the processes I mentioned. We also serve as a supply center for our global projects. What kind of work do you do to improve the service you offer in order to serve your customers better? Could you convey your R&D activities? Since we operate in a wide variety of sectors, we are a company that constantly learns from market needs and offers tailored solutions. For example, we can apply a technological development we have achieved in wet grinding technologies to dry grinding technologies. Or we can adapt a dry grinding and classification process for industrial minerals when we understand the specific requirements of any end product in the cosmetics sector. Therefore, I can say that R&D work is involved in every project we undertake. Are there any new products that you plan to present to the sector as a result of your studies? I can say that our Pamir mill, which we recently introduced, has made a significant difference in dry grinding technologies. We can create substantial advantages in production costs by providing high energy efficiency in micronized dry grinding of industrial raw materials such as calcite, talc and barite used in the paint industry. We also offer higher color intensity, less waste, high energy efficiency and sustainable production with our Neos mills, which are used for paint grinding as well. How do you evaluate the development of the paint industry in Turkey? What is the importance of the Turkish market in the world? As you know, we are the 5th largest paint producer country in Europe. Due to this position, our paint industry must grow by constantly competing with European manufacturers, particularly on the basis of quality. Beyond the increasing technological infrastructure investments required by this competition, we observe growing orientation towards high-value-added products driven by R&D activities. Based on our belief in this potential and sector development, Netzsch, through its grinding laboratory investment at our Izmir location, offers our customers scalable process support for their R&D studies and production processes. Sustainability has become increasingly important due to the global climate crisis and resource depletion. What sustainability studies does Netzsch conduct? As Netzsch, we are a company that believes in continuous improvement, and our main objective in all technologies we develop and offer is high energy efficiency and sustainability. For example, with our recently developed Pamir mill, we create an environmental advantage with 30% lower energy consumption compared to existing dry grinding processes for industrial minerals—the main cost item for our customers per ton of production. Similarly, with our Neos high-performance wet grinding mills, we offer advantages in paint production processes such as reduced energy consumption, shorter processing time and lower emissions, providing up to 10 times higher performance. We have gone through an extended pandemic period and its effects continue. How did this period affect your company and what precautions did you take? At the beginning, like all companies, we had no way of knowing how the pandemic would develop, how severe it would be or how it would impact our business. However, since we have a dynamic and flexible team that can use any location with phone and internet access as an office, we managed to emerge from the process successfully. Similarly, like many of our customers, Netzsch Turkey managed to increase our exports by turning the disruption in global supply chains into an opportunity during the pandemic period.