As one of Turkey's leading industrial companies, we had a pleasant conversation with Aydın Öğücü, a Board Member of Lila Group, talking about a company operates in 4 different fields: Textile, Energy, Fast Consumption and Paper Production. We interviewed with Lila Group on several trendy topics, a company that has made a name for itself in the textile industry with its new investments, and received sincere answers from Mr. Aydın. Happy reading…
Q. Could you introduce Lila Group to our readers?
A. The roots of our group go back nearly 100 years. The foundations of our company were first laid by Hasan Öğücü and his sons in 1930 with the first 'Ginning and Weaving' establishment; In line with the objectives of development and progress in parallel with the industrialization movement that started in Turkey since 1950’s, it continued in 1964 with the enterpreneur" Güneydoğu İplik Sanayi’'under the leadership of Abdullah Öğücü. Our company, which was founded under the name of Marmara Pamuklu Mensucat in 1984, again under the leadership of Abdullah Öğücü, became the largest integrated cotton yarn and dyeing facility in Turkey in the 90’s. Our corporate efforts in dyeing business played a critical role in carrying the Lila Group to where they stand today. Thanks to our dedicated and intense exports through spreading our domestic leadership in our field to foreign markets several awards were made possible in the 90’s and 2000’s by the Istanbul Exporters' Association and the Istanbul Textile and Raw Materials Exporters', In 2003, we invested in the dye house, which is the complementary business area of the textile industry, and established a facility with the latest technology of its time.
By considering the whole demand of our country since the 2000s, we took part in the energy sector in 2005 by turning to areas that require high added value and advanced technology, apart from textiles.
With our investment decision in 2006, we established Lila Kagit, our headquarters in Istanbul, in Çorlu with 100% domestic capital. We have been continuing our work by making new investments since the day we started production with the vision of manufacturing paper cleaners at world standards.
Q. Could you give information about your products and product quality in the Textile Industry?
A. Our dye business within Lila Group has been manufacturing by using dyes and chemicals that do not harm the environment since the first day of its establishment. In recent years, we have been putting yarns with increasing recycling properties, organic yarns, antibacterial, organic, dyeing into our manufacturing lines. In addition, cotton, viscose, polyester, polyamide, bamboo, modal, recycled polyester and their blends are dyed in single and double layers in our dyehouse.
Q. What do you pay attention to in your productions? Do you have any working rules that you consider indispensable?
A. As Lila Group, we have been striving to be beneficial and add value to society, nature, the environment and humanity since the day we founded. All commercial concerns putting aside; we see ourselves as responsible for raising the values of our country and for providing benefits to our society.
We believe that the concept of 'sustainability' means the consumption of resources with a conscious and meeting the needs of future generations, that means in return, meeting the needs of present while meeting the needs of future generations. We continue to take steps on environmental, social and economic sustainability, which are the three major topics of sustainability.
We updated our facility, which we have modernized as of May 2021, with an infrastructure that could allow us to save 25% water and 30% energy due to our sensitivity approach towards the environment. In addition, we realized our automation investments focused on quality and efficiency simultaneously.
Q. In what ways does Lila Group differ from its competitors, what makes you different? Why should your customers choose Lila Group?
A. In 2014, we set out our journey with the aim of "Being an expert, responsible and natural brand that offers the highest quality products with the awareness of leaving a greener and more livable world to future generations".
We operate in a sector that is suitable for Turkey's current conditions and opportunities. We made our investments at a time when sectoral innovations depended on the right technology was achievable while running our business. We do our business reliably with all of our resources, especially with man power and capital. As a start-up in this sector, we are in favor of new product launch and increasing innovation. As a company, I can say that our main difference is our scale, integration, customer focus and freedom.
Q. Lila Group is one of the biggest companies in Turkey. To what extent do you attach importance to R&D studies on developing new products?
A. As C. Lila Group, we carry out Product Development studies, which we call P&D in the tissue paper sector, rather than Research and Development studies, and we take important steps in this regard every year as part of our mission to bring innovations to our sector, both as a product and as a process. We believe that the product variety must be bundled for our tissue paper market to grow healthily. For this reason, we are making new investments in order to offer more practical, economical and environmentally friendly products to consumers. At this point, technology comes into play and investments in R&D; The value that companies attach to innovation is of great importance for our industry.
Similarly, we are focused on responding to the demands of our customers in the fastest way and meeting their expectations in the textile business field, both through our customer-oriented production approach and our focus on quality.
Today, when we evaluate all of our fields of activity, we export 65% of our production and 35% meets our consumers in the domestic market.
Q. Could you tell us about your machines, quality certificates and certificates you have?
A. Currently, we operate in the textile field as one of 4 different fields in our production campus in Çorlu, with our dyehouse facility of 20 thousand square meters, of which 15 thousand square meters is closed. We are the main supplier of almost all the world's leading apparel buyers, directly and indirectly. In our facility, we produce high quality products with ZDHC, Detox, Gots Organic, Repreve, Ekotex 100 Class 1, BSCI, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 18001, ISO 45001, ISO 50001 certificates. In the conditions of increasing competition, the cost of faulty production affects profitability. We supply dyed yarn to our customers by producing with high efficiency. Our dyehouse facility has a daily capacity of 25-30 tons. In our textile business, we aim to increase our productivity by 100% with our new investment of 55 million TL and our modernization efforts. We attach great importance to the modernization works to be done; because with this work that will serve our quality-oriented export target, we will provide central and real-time quality control of all machines with a system called MillMaster TOP with fully automatic ERP integration. In other words, we will form an environment for us in which we do not compromise quality and manufacture efficiently. In addition, with this investment and modernization, which will add significant value to us in the fields of environment and sustainability, which we have been sensitive to since the day we were founded, we will achieve a total of 30 percent energy savings and 25 percent water savings per year. We are proud to be contributing to our country's economy and employment in the textile sector with our additional investment that we put into operation at the beginning of May.
In addition to all these, previoıus month, as Lila Group, with the understanding of 'Health First', in order to ensure well-being and health of our employees during the pandemic, by taking all kinds of precautions in our production facility under the guidance of the Hygiene, Infection Prevention and Control Guide published by the Turkish Standards Institute for Industrial Organizations We were entitled to receive the 'TSE Covid-19 Safe Production Certificate'.
Q. How did you spend 2020 as Lila Group? Can we get your goals, expectations and predictions in 2021?
A. When we look at textiles, we pased thruogh our investment decision in this challenging year, even though leaving the challenging 2020 behind. Therefore, for Lila Group, 2020 can be defined as the year of growth stemming from our investments in all our business areas. 2021 will be the year of growth with the effect of these investments and the effect of our new investments becoming operational. We think that the growth for Lila Group in 2021 will be realized both in the domestic market and in the foreign market originating from new customers/countries.
We have always pursued an innovative approach and have asked for ourselves in the market a concept helping us to make a difference with our products and meet the demand of our users. We aim to continue to be involved with our products that create the economy and create awareness in the field of social responsibility with new products that have not been produced in Turkey as much as possible.
In 2021, we will focus on activities with high added value, focused on exports and new markets, in order to ensure sustainability in our existing areas.
Q. Mr. Aydın, is there anything you would like to add at the end?
A. Investments are to be updated and renewed for all manufacturing enterprises. As we have experienced the most upgraded version of our industry with these investments, we will not seek for technology upgrades for a long time.
