Systemair has signed an agreement to acquire 70% of the shares in the Turkish company HSK. HSK is Turkey’s leading manufacturer of air handling units and in 2011 the company had a turnover of SEK 160 million. The company has two production facilities on the outskirts of Istanbul, as well as sales offices in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Dubai and Iraq.
“Turkey is an interesting market with great potential and Turkish construction companies are also very active in surrounding markets. We see good synergy with our newly acquired Italian chiller factory.”, says Svein Nilsen, Marketing Director for Systemair”
“We will initially acquire 70% and have a binding option to acquire the remaining 30% within a period of four years. The takeover is expected to take place during May this year.”, says Gerald Engström, President and CEO for Systemair.
Systemair is a leading ventilation company with operations in 44 countries in Europe, North & South America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Australia. The Company had sales of SEK 3.47 billion in financial 2010/11 and currently employs about 3,100 people. Systemair has reported an operating profit every year since 1974, when the Company was founded. During the past 15 years, the Company’s growth rate has averaged about 14 percent.
Systemair has well-established operations in growth markets. The Group’s products are marketed under the Systemair, Frico, VEAB and Fantech brands. Systemair shares have been quoted on the Mid Cap List of the OMX Nordic Exchange in Stockholm since October 2007. The Group comprises about 60 companies.
Turkish Airlines (THY) won two awards within the scope of “2012 Freddie Awards”.
THY stated on Wednesday that it won awards in “best airline program of the year” and “best credit card program of the year” categories in Europe/Africa zone.
THY Director General Temel Kotil said that THY won the awards thanks to its intensive efforts.
THY is the national flag carrier airline of Turkey, headquartered in Istanbul. It operates scheduled services to 150 international and 41 domestic cities (38 domestic airports), serving a total of 187 airports, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Freddie Awards are the most prestigious member-generated awards in the travel loyalty industry. The goal of the Freddie Awards is to give voice to the frequent flyer and to honor the efforts of an industry that counts more than 300 million members worldwide.
Istanbul Shopping Festival will be held in Dubai from June 9 to 29
By Habib Toumi, Bureau Chief
Gulf News
Manama: Turkish stars will fly to Dubai to help promote the Istanbul Shopping Festival to be held in the cosmopolitan city from June 9 to 29.
Kivanç Tatlitug whose fame as romantic Mohannad in a Turkish drama captured the hearts of women across the Arab world and created a wave of regional interest in his homeland will be in Dubai on May 8 and will take part in a press conference, Turkish sources told Gulf News.
Tatlitug hopes that the romantic gestures in soap operas that gave a great boost to tourism in Istanbul and beyond among Arabs will have the same success in attracting more people to the festival in the city that spans two continents.
Turkish officials said that the 21-day festival is a step forward to maintain Istanbul one of the top destinations in the world.
“Istanbul is a destination with different attractive faces that encompass business, tourism and entertainment,” Hakan Kodal, the festival co-chair, said. “We want our city to be a come-back destination where people can have great opportunities and enjoy its features, concerts and shopping.”
The festival was pushed back from March to June to ensure better weather conditions, he said.
“In 2011, we had a successful festival, and we will build on our success stories and experience to have a better and more enjoyable festival this year. We decided to have it in June because the weather conditions are more clement and people can enjoy the multitude of shows and open air concerts we will have.”
Lebanese superstar Nancy Ajram is scheduled to perform in Taksim, the main commercial and cultural area in modern Istanbul.
Kodal said that the turnover in 2011 was TL8 billion in 40 days.
“Our expectations are TL7 billion in 21 days in 2012,” he said.
According to Fusun Sonmez, the festival general manager, Istanbul is expecting 850,000 visitors in June.
We had 773,092 visitors in June 2011, and we expect more to come and enjoy the city and the festival this year,” she said.
Official figures indicate that around seven million people annually visit the metropolitan, one of the largest in Europe, inhabited by 12.5 million residents.
Shopping malls and shops will remain open late into the evening and will give huge discounts. Turkish Air has also pledged special fares.
“There are also deals with hotels for packages and we are confident that the festival will be highly successful,” she said.
The private sector and the civil society organisations are fully behind the shopping extravaganza and tourism drive, she said.
via gulfnews : Turkish superstars to promote Istanbul festival in Dubai.
Transportation Minister Binali Yıldırım praised the Cancal Istanbul project yesterday at the First Marmara and Black Sea Conference in Istanbul, saying it would be finalized in five to six years, and that the project was aimed at protecting the Bosphorus.
“Of the 50,000 ships that pass through the Bosphorus, 9,500 carry dangerous materials. The total weight of these materials is 150 million tons,” said Yıldırım, adding that if there was an accident the consequences could be disastrous. He explained that it was not possible to expand the borders of the Bosphorus and that protecting the waterway was a top priority.
“Canal Istanbul is a project that is very important to us. Once it is completed, we will have a waterway on which we will be able to completely control the traffic on the Bosphorus,” said Yıldırım. He also added that the Canal Istanbul Project would benefit oil tankers that currently lose money due to the congestion as they wait to enter the Bosphorus.
“We plan to complete this project in five to six years and we are currently working on the plans,” said Yıldırım.
According to Yıldırım, once every 40 hours one of the tankers crossing the Bosphorus faces a mechanical problem, and it is only due to strict controls that there have been no major incidents over the past ten years.
via LOCAL – Canal Istanbul to be real in six years, minister claims.
Azerbaijan and Turkey plan to complete delayed talks on the proposed Trans-Anatolia pipeline that will carry Azeri natural gas across Turkey to Europe by the end of the month.
“We aim to complete talks this month and sign the inter- governmental agreement by June 30,” Elshad Nasirov, vice president of State Oil Co. of Azerbaijan, known as Socar, said today in an interview in the capital of Baku. The deal was held up issues over tax and the investment regime, according to Nasirov.
The two sides signed a memorandum of understanding in December on the 2,000-kilometer (1,240-mile) pipeline known as Tanap that will transport gas from the BP Plc-led Shah Deniz field in Azerbaijan’s section of the Caspian Sea. Socar has an 80 percent stake, while Turkey’s state pipeline company Boru Hatlari Ile Petrol Tasima AS, or Botas, and oil company Turkiye Petrolleri AO have a combined 20 percent.
At an estimated cost of $5 billion to $7 billion, the partners plan to build Tanap before the start of production from the second phase of the Shah Deniz project, due in 2017 or 2018. It will link up with other proposed pipelines, such as Nabucco West, that are vying for the rights to deliver the fuel on to the European Union from the Turkish border.
Size of Stakes
The delay in agreeing a deal wasn’t caused by disagreements over the size of stakes in the project, according to Nasirov. The Azeri news agency Turan cited unidentified Turkish officials in March as saying that Turkey wanted to boost its stake in Tanap to as much as 50 percent.
“We have not received any proposal from the Turkish side on this,” Nasirov said today.
Tanap will initially be able to carry 16 billion cubic meters of gas a year, with capacity rising to more than 30 billion cubic meters as and when additional sources are found, Nasirov said.
The Shah Deniz group will choose between Nabucco West, a revised version of the EU-backed project, and BP’s South East Europe Pipeline option, or SEEP, “no later than June 30,” he said.
While Nabucco is a “fantastic” project even though it has financial difficulties, SEEP is less advanced, according to Nasirov.
The winner of the Central European route will then compete with the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, or TAP, that’s being developed by EGL AG, Statoil ASA (STL) and EON Ruhrgas AG. The Shah Deniz partners will make a final decision by mid-2013, he said.
Azerbaijan can supply 10 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe for at least 25 years, the executive said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Zulfugar Agayev in Baku at zagayev@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Hellmuth Tromm at htromm@bloomberg.net
via Azerbaijan, Turkey to Sign Delayed Tanap Pipe Deal End of June – Businessweek.
Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine, is aiming for at least 20% of Turkey’s search traffic after the company expanded there last year, according to the company’s co-founder.
Ilya Segalovich, CTO of Yandex, told The Wall Street Journal Europe that in most markets the dominant search player has 60% to 70% of the market, while the second player has around 20% to 30%. His first aim is to be the second player in the market.
“The first stage of success will be to have 20-30 market share. If we can get to the end of the year 5% that would be great for us. So far we have less than 1%,” he said.
According to company figures released in January, Yandex is attracting some 100,000 daily users. Turkey’s online audience is estimated to be 35,000,000 according to Internet World Stats.
Mr. Segalovich said Yandex had chosen the country as their first non-Russian speaking venture for two reasons: it was being under-served by Google and it provided a good challenge.
Getty Images Segalovich: Turkey is a huge opportunity
“We liked Turkey first because they have great growth opportunities. It is a huge country with lots of potential users [and a] fast-growing Internet. We looked at the services provided by Google. Without competition the quality of the services is lower than it is with competition.”
But, said Mr. Segalovich, there was simply the difficulty of the challenge itself. “Will we be able to go to the country where we don’t know the language? It is not going to the country where most of the employees speak Russian, like Bulgaria or Poland. Going to Turkey no one speaks Russian. We had to redesign all the internal procedures and the parts of the engine to be worked with people who don’t know Russian.”
There was one interesting challenge they had to tackle regarding their version of Street View: the law required them to blur faces. “That is technologically a hard task to do. Google was doing that. It required a super-hard effort to have a face recognition on a huge scale. We spent three months making this,” Mr. Segalovich said.
But there was a problem. “Unfortunately, we blurred Ataturk’s face. There is another law that prohibits this in Turkey.”
Now, every time a complaint is raised about blurring of Ataturk’s face, the company goes in by hand and manually un-blurs the image. “We are very happy to do this. It is about being culturally sensitive,” Mr. Segalovich said.
Mr. Segalovich wouldn’t say which countries the company was looking at next, but did hint that further expansion was highly likely. He suggested that it was more likely to be elsewhere in Europe, rather than in areas like the Middle East.
In a wide ranging interview, Mr. Segalovich also said Russian e-commerce is set to take off thanks to Apple Inc.’s iPhone.
“The iPhone appears and suddenly Russians start to pay for apps on the iPhone,” he said. “You can imagine how hard it was to get people to pay just 100 rubles ($3.40) over the Internet just a few years ago. They were just ‘why should I? Can I find it free?’ Now it is getting more like a habit after the iPhone.”
Mr. Segalovich was a guest speaker at the recent TNW conference in Amsterdam and discussed how the Russian Internet is changing and the company’s recent expansion into Turkey.
He admitted that even if people wanted to pay for things, the mechanisms to do so and the logistics to deliver goods have some way to go. Still, he was optimistic that change was happening quickly.
“You can look at the share of tickets bought online in Russia. After people start to use plastic cards to pay for tickets they get used to paying for anything else. That part of the story is changing rapidly in front of our eyes. There are lots of good signs about that.”
Yandex is Russia’s largest search engine and claims to be the most popular site in the Russian-speaking Internet. In May 2011, Yandex raised $1.3 billion in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq. It was the biggest U.S. IPO for a dotcom since Google Inc. went public in 2004.
Ilya Segalovich,
Russia,
Turkey,
Yandex
via Yandex Aims For 20% of Turkey’s Traffic – Tech Europe – WSJ.
