Message from the President,

Our valued friends,

We are currently observing all world economies struggling with fluctuations. The USA is demonstrating the indications of recovery after bandaging its economic wounds. The economies in the Eurozone, except for Germany, have been in a tough situation; they have not had the expected recovery yet.

In light of all these developments, the Turkey’s economy has been using the diversification of markets and trying to compensate its losses at the Eurozone by increasing its trade with Middle Eastern, African, and neighboring countries. In order to decrease the financial stagnation, the Central Banks across the world have caused an unprecedented abundant liquidity with excessive money flow into the markets; consequently, the interest rates have plummeted at a record-breaking degree.

In this economic environment, Turkey has endeavored to make the foreign funds permanent as physical investments by providing incentives and tax exemptions and has been considerably successful in doing that.

The portion of alcoholic beverages in the sector of Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) that we serve has grown by 4%. After a steep increase, the automotive sector has shrunk by 5%. Tobacco sector has grown 3% and tea products have grown 1.8%. While the leaning and detergent sector has grown by 5% as value, it has shrunk volumetrically. Lastly, the food sector has grown 3.6%.

All these ups and downs have definitely impacted us as well. Although our sales have grown more or less than their values, in general, their trends have continued as parallel to the sector growths.

As MERCAN CORPORATE GROUP, we have continued our investments by adding many more new dealerships and distributorships to our company.

We have expanded our region by adding the Edirne province to our distributorship of Philip Morris, the founder of the tobacco sector.

We continue doing very positive jobs in Turkey operations with Henkel, the world chemistry giant, and finally, began works in Anatolian part of Istanbul, Adana province, and the neighboring provinces.

In our Volkswagen enterprise, we have accomplished higher degrees of Service investments than increasing sales numbers and we started seeing its returns. In 2012, our Edirne Service point won the first place in the category of Customer Satisfaction Quality amongst 2400 service points in 26 countries in Europe. Thus, it was the first time this award left Germany.

Our farming work has been horizontal in dry farming, but has exponentially increased in irrigated farming.

In light of all this information, we had the environment to expand our investments in the last five years. We went through this period with a strong development by making good economic partnerships. We financially expanded and made profits. Most importantly, we SERVED our customers WITHOUT LOSING OUR SPIRIT OF TRADESMANSHIP, by PRIORITIZING OUR CUSTOMERS’ SATISFACTION as always; then gains happened by themselves.

The years of 2016 and 2017[BY1] will be the years when MERCAN CORPORATE GROUP increase its efficiency and become more institutionally functional. In addition to these; all our employees will have completed their institutional training and in-service training will have become invaluable.

Like our founder, M.Kerami MERCAN, taught us while raising us;

"Honesty is like a silk thread. It thins out but never breaks."
"No matter how smart you are, first off, be organized and then work VERY HARD."
"When you encounter challenges, DO NOT QUIT, and FIGHT until the end."
"We cannot be successful without self-devotion and sacrifice, we definitely need to sacrifice something. We cannot be successful without paying this price."

We combine his philosophies and tradesmen perspectives with today’s values and our companies continue working in today’s world and will continue in the years to come this way.

Stressing one more time how proud we feel being the son of a merchant like M. Kerami MERCAN, I am happy to share with you that we will continue working in light of his values, without conceding the principles of honesty, quality and trust.

Respectfully,
Tolga MERCAN
Chairman of the Board
Mercan Corporate Group