We had a pleasant interview with Mr. Tolga Çeltekligil, General Manager of Bühler AG Turkey. Çeltekligil told about the Bühler AG Turkey’s success story in Turkey.
Could you briefly tell our readers about yourself and your educational background?
After graduating from Sankt Georg Austrian High School, I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. I took my master’s degree on “Control Systems and Robotic” from University of Manchester. I started my professional career at Siemens.
I worked in various positions in Siemens such as business development manager, business sector manager, regional manager first in Istanbul-Turkey and then in Manchester-UK and finally in Nürnberg-Germany.
Afterwards I have taken sales director and general manager responsibilities in multinational companies like Emerson and Metso, I became managing director of Bühler AG Turkey in 2016. Together with our current and growing team, we offer state-of-art Bühler technologies in every field to Turkish Industry.
Could you tell us about the development of Bühler AG from its foundation to this today?
Above all, Bühler is a 100% family-owned company, which has been manufacturing world-class, high-quality machinery and technology and has being managed by professionals on non-stop basis for 159 years since 1860 when it was established.
Bühler is the first company who has converted conventional milling methods to the industrial level together with the first Industrial Revolution. Today, our Swiss-based company is operating in more than 140 countries and generates 3 billion Franc turnover by 2018 with its approximately 11 thousand employees worldwide.
Bühler differentiates itself from all other competitors in the market with 150 million Franc R&D budgets.
During the period, company has grown by both organically and also (by acquisitions) inorganically and today it is one of the technology leaders that specialised in milling and related plan engineering in ink, paint, chemistry, nanotechnology, food, and auto motive industries by 37 manufacturing sites and 100 service stations worldwide that one of them is also located in Izmir, Turkey.
Bühler manufactured the first flour mill in 1890, the first pasta production line in 1903, the first paint&coating& ink three roll mills in 1919. It has carried out countless projects both in Turkey and in the world in this market since 1959 by concentrating on ‘Chemical Process Engineering’.
Moreover, it has reinforced its strong place in low- viscosity paint&ink&coating manufacturing technologies by incorporating Draiswerke GmbH (Drais) in 2006.
Each year Bühler shares the average 5% of its total turnover into R&D; marked his vision with the motto “Innovations for a Better World.
What are the major industries that Bühler AG supplies products for and what kind of products are they? Can you tell us about products, brand and services?
Bühler’s fields of activity are mainly divided into two categories. These are; Food Proccesing Technologies and Advanced Materials Technologies. Around 4000 different types of machines and technologies are produced in these two segments. About 25% of the technologies are patented by Bühler.
In food processing side, we are active in grain milling-processing and logistic, rice milling-processing, sorting (Sortex™) of rice&pulses, food drying technologies (Aeroglide™), animal feed production technologies, oil production technologies, consumer foods include mainly cacao, chocolate, pasta and malt with all grinding,
molding, packaging by complete process chain technology and installation. Bühler is one of the leading companies in the food technologies sector with a market share of 25% to 65% in these areas.
Advanced material technologies business area is divided into 3 main business units.
These are aluminum die-casting technologies especially used in the automotive industry; coating technologies of glass, packaging, flexible electronics, lens coatings are collected under the name of leybold optics and finally the wet grinding and dispersing technologies such as paint, ink and coating Etc.
Bühler is one of the leading companies in this sector as well with its market shares ranging from 30% to 50% in these areas.
Could you please tell us about your product lines in paint sector, which is among Bühler’s fields of activity in Turkey, and their properties?
Bühler carries out its operations in this area under ‘Grinding&Dispersing’ segment. Bühler is a company manufacturing machinery and technology in all processes where wet milling is needed, at all particle size distribution targets and for all product types with all viscosities, and at all scales.
We manufacture Cenomic ™ and Centex™ series, full-capacity horizontal bead mills and SuperFlow™ and MicroMedia™ series unique high-energy vertical bead mills for operations of low-to-medium-viscosity products.
The newly developed pre-grinding machine called Macromedia™ technology was very well integrated to the market and we could reach the significant sales units also in Turkey.
Beside Trinomic™ and Trias™ series three roll mill machines for operations of medium-high-extreme- viscosity products we launched our Visconomic+ ™ series mills, which is the latest technology and were launched in China Coat fair last December.
In addition to them, we are also able to actualise high- speed dissolvers, press-out systems, let-down tanks, and also complete plant installations at desired automation level with our ‘Engineering’ department’s expert teams on turn-key basis.
In the last 6 years, we could build 2 plants in those areas and also more than 100 single machines were sold in Turkey which is a real success story.
Could you describe the importance of the Turkish market for Bühler AG?
After Bühler realized the first complete mill machine production in 1890, it can be said that it started its activities in 1903 with the first machine installation in Edirne. Bühler machines were used in Afyon in 1920s and in Bursa in 1930s.
Since the beginning of the year 1950, it was always Bühler’s representative in Turkey. The establishment of a permanent office has been Bühler Turkey in the early 1980s.
For us, Turkey has always been an attractive country with its idiosyncratic dynamics and potential. In our country, there are really strong diversified industries spread across different areas. Our company is active in Turkey in all areas I just mentioned.
This is not very common on a global scale. For this reason, we have reached a team of approximately 40 people with our business partners by expanding our local technical sales and service organization.
Bühler local market as well as “Grinding&Dispersing” business unit in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) operations are managed from Turkey. The Bühler experts in all areas where it operates, with headquarters in Istanbul branch office in Izmir and Ankara are serving customers all over Turkey.
Today, Bühler’s machines are used in all regions of Turkey from Izmir to Mardin, from Gaziantep to Samsun, from Trabzon to Tekirdag, and from Kayseri to Bursa.
Finally, together with our local project and procurement team, which we have established in Istanbul and working closely with our headquarter in Switzerland, we could built relations with Turkish companies that adopt the creative, agile and high quality production understanding of Turkish Industry, and we supply parts-equipment from here. In this sense, we contribute to our country’s economy as foreign exchange input.
Could you tell us about your domestic and overseas sale activities?
We moved our service station in Izmir in 2017 to its new place in Kemalpasa with 1800 m2. By this way, we could start comprehensive technical service in all areas we operate in Turkey and we started to provide better spare parts services.
At this center, we are able to offer workshop, seminar and training opportunities to our customers through the conference hall we have assembled in the facility as well as collecting various parts, machine maintenance and repair works, spare parts stock, service and process engineering services.
Finally, in the last quarter of 2018, we organized our seminar called ’Grinding and Dispersing Academy’ in our service center with more than 100 participants.
In the organization where participants from many different sectors and different cities such as ink, paint, coating, cosmetics, ceramics, mining, digital printing, nanotechnology, agro chemicals showed great interest, we met with all stakeholders and exchanged ideas on both technical and commercial basis.
I think it is very important to create this synergy. For this reason, we will continue to organize such organizations regularly with the same excitement every year.
In addition to this, we can offer our test machine available in Turkey. We are able to set up our grinding mills which are used in a one-to-one production scale to our customers’ fields, and experiment with technical and process support.
Thus, companies who have not had the opportunity to work with Bühler machines have the chance to test their own products and machines on their own terms. Finally, we have started to offer our customers the opportunity to sell many of our machines with local contracts through our local stock.
We are committed to reflect Bühler’s global leadership in to Turkey. We are able to meet Bühler’s innovative and top-level technologies with Turkish manufacturers in accordance with country dynamics.
Could you tell us about your laboratory and R&D works? Do you have projects that you developed under the scope of university -industry collaboration, what are they?
Bühler has adopted the necessity of sustainable success as an unchanging corporate policy. The most important basis of this understanding is of course R&D. Each year Bühler shares the average 5% of its total turnover into R&D; marked his vision with the motto “Innovations for a Better World “.
With an investment of approximately 80 million Francs in our headquarters in Uzwil, Switzerland, we started the construction of an innovation center called CUBIC about 2 years ago. We would like to continue being the center of technology and innovation with this complex, which will be operational in March 2019.
In the innovation activities we have privatized under the name of “Digital Technologies”, we have signed a partnership that has attracted attention in the whole sector. With the launch of Microsoft’s CEO,
Bühler opened the door to an optimal user experience using Microsoft’s cloud services on its digitally controlled machines and facilities.
On the other hand, we cooperate with well-respected universities and research institutes around the world, as well as our R&D and test centers which are distributed in different geographies such as Switzerland, Germany, USA, Japan, China, India. Bühler, who is one of the founders of the innovation campus of the Lausanne
Polytechnic University (EPFL), also works on the technologies of the future with his laboratory and team, and also supports the technology start-ups through this
center. ETH Zurich (Switzerland); University of Toronto (Canada), University of Minnesota (USA), University of Applied Sciences (Germany), Leibniz Institute for New Materials (Germany) are other partners of Bühler where mutual R&D studies are ongoing.
Could you tell us about the works you conduct on environment and sustainability?
The main slogan of Bühler, which is ‘Innovations for a better world’, emphasizes us being an ever-growing, ever-developing technology leader. We aim to contribute to people’s life quality by ensuring a sustainable, independent development with our products, processes, and services and promising a 100% engineering achievement.
Our company policy is made up of 8 main understandings. Sustainable growth, understanding introducing customers’ successes as a criterion, all-purpose balanced product range, fruitful services, world-class local services, innovativeness, leadership in quality, and sound workforce.
Bühler supports the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Program and accepts it as a binding corporate company target. Among the 17 sustainability targets offered by the UN; Bühler applies short and long-term action plans for 30% reduction of food waste and 30% reduction in energy consumption.
It’s an important responsibility for Bühler to protect the environment. Environmental management concept is based on observation of ecological impacts on economical and social issues and binding upon all Bühler plants throughout the world.
Bühler is among the first firms accredited with ISO 14001 certification in Switzerland and in full conformity with the targets determined with REACH instructions. Energy efficiency that is another important part of environmental conscience has a high importance to Bühler.
With energy efficiency projects that we carried out in our central plant, we managed to reduce water consumption of 65,218 m3 to 56,300 m3 by distillation and recycling of waste water of different types. This difference can be tangibly seen in our products and services that are offered to our customers.
With approximate computations, we install machinery/systems with electricity power of 220 – 250 megawatt in total per year all around the world. It’s always very pleasing for us to see that our customers make high energy-efficient productions.
By continuing, without a break, their operations on heat recovery systems, Bühler’s engineers ensure us to put on market milling machinery with cooling and heating system in optimum operating range in each season.
Anything you want to add…
Bühler has become the dominant technology supplier of the industry for lithium-ion battery technologies, which we first started about 15 years ago. Especially in this sector which we entered with an innovative process understanding with extrusion system by eliminating simple, bulky and cost-effective and low-efficient mixing technologies, we became a preferred brand of electric vehicle manufacturers that are spreading rapidly today.
We are moving forward with turn-key projects in China, USA and now in Europe. We are in contact with organizations that plan to invest in this area in both laboratory and on a large scale in Turkey as well. I hope that we will take mutual steps in this field to catch the era by Turkey .
Finally, we are waiting for the kind visits of all our friends who want to get to know our new generation of pre-grinding mill MacroMedia™ and our last technology mill Visconomic+™. Thank you.
