Can anyone tell me what the OYAK chief is talking about? Most likely another lousy report translated in English by our fine Hurriyet expose-journalists.
Export concepts, says OYAK chief
MARDIN - OYAK, Turkey’s leading pension fund which is active in automotive, steel, cement and energy, may ’export’the formula that made it a success over the past nine years, according to Chairman Coşkun Ulusoy. ’Imagine the name of any major private equity fund or pension fund worldwide, and I can guarantee you we are talking to them,’Ulusoy says.
At a time of plummeting exports amid global recession, the chairman of Turkey’s leading pension fund suggested a novel means to economic revival over the weekend: "export of concepts."
Selling a Turkish business model abroad might sound a bit far-fetched. But Coşkun Ulusoy, head of the military pension fund OYAK made it clear at his annual press briefing that this was the next project up his sleeve.
"Imagine the name of any major private equity fund or pension fund worldwide, and I can guarantee you we are talking to them," Coşkun told a gathering of business reporters and editors assembled at an OYAK’s Mardin Çimento cement factory in this historic city. "We can export concepts."
At the moment, OYAK’s exports are limited to cement, steel and cars and light trucks from its Renault-Mais division. Its 50-odd companies dominant in basic industries turned a profit of $2 billion last year and despite the harsh economic environment Ulusoy predicts the group will again be profitable this year.
But, he explained, the fund’s longer-term success may well come by selling the formula that made its remarkable success over the past nine years possible. That success, he argued, is in the fund’s unique daring to eschew the passive investment strategies of comparable pension funds in favor of a strategy of taking majority interest in firms, joining the management and actually running them.
"This is a unique model of success and its also uniquely Turkish," Ulusoy told an informal three-hour gathering. "If Turkey is going to export something, let’s export this model."
(I believe this is called private equity!?!)
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Publisher: Jon H. Black
