SAMM’s Difference in Technology and Informatics!
SAMM Teknoloji İletişim San.ve Tic., a manufacturing and engineering company that was founded 18 years ago and has been serving in different sectors, especially fiber optic systems and IoT, in GOSB since 2015. While A.Ş. showed great success by being among the top 100 fastest growing companies in Turkey last year, this year it was also selected as SME in the Electrical, Electronics and Automation Products Industry category at the 13th Sectoral Performance Evaluation Awards organized by Kocaeli Chamber of Industry. won the award.
We talked about the technological work, achievements and goals of SAMM Teknoloji Inc. with the company’s general manager, Mustafa Akşit;
1. As SAMM Teknoloji, can you give information about your company’s work and products?
Our company is now 18 years old, so we can say that it has proven its maturity. Today; We are a larger family with over 250 employees, 60 of whom are engineers, 2 factories and an R&D center in Gebze.
SAMM Teknoloji; It operates in many different sectors such as Fiber Optic Accessory Production, IT and Electrical Contracting. We have production capabilities and services that require labor and engineering knowledge.
2. Last year, you received an award by being among the 100 fastest growing companies in Turkey. Now you have won KSO’s Sectoral Performance Award. What would you like to say as an award-winning company?
Yes, as SAMM Teknoloji, we are among the top 100 fastest growing companies, which of course shows the turnover growth. However, we grow and develop together with our colleagues, suppliers and customers we work with. Every year, we aim not only to grow in turnover compared to the previous year, but also to grow and develop as a team. With this strategy, we both raise the bar in our industry and gain moral pleasure.
I attach great importance to the concept of “company”. A company is not a place that gives you a salary, as we know it, where you come in at 9 in the morning and leave at 6 in the evening! The company is a team effort, a coordination. Company; It is a place to apply the diploma you have studied for years, the books you have read, and the family upbringing you have received. Companies can change the fate of villages, districts, provinces, countries and even the world. The company is not just a place to make money for employees and owners. The company is a Social responsibility. If companies are managed with the right strategies, they can survive for centuries. After adopting this understanding, we realized how many fine details we, as company managers, need to consider in the decisions we make, and we started to share this data with relevant organizations to question our place in the industry.
Such awards actually leave us with beautiful memories that make us forget the tiredness of the year. It is a criterion that shows us what we did wrong and what we did right. I would like to thank TOBB and other professional organizations for leading these organizations and bringing us together.
3. You were deemed worthy of the grand prize in the SME category at the 3rd KSO Sectoral Performance Awards. Were you expecting this award? How did you feel when you won?
Frankly, I was not aware of such an organization, but when I was invited, I saw that being able to receive an award in such a category in a region like the Marmara Region, where the industry’s busiest and most respected companies are located, made us and our colleagues very happy. I generally do not prefer to participate in such organizations, but it is always enjoyable and useful to be together and chat with our colleagues who have gone through difficulties, struggled and achieved success like us.
4. As SAMM Teknoloji Market, you have also turned to electronic commerce. What kind of products do you offer for sale in this market? Can you talk about it?
Distribution of Raspberry Pi products in Turkey, which we started in 2012 as a hobby or a social responsibility project, has reached a different dimension today. We now employ 10 of our colleagues in the relevant department. We support very good R&D projects and create opportunities for our children and researchers who need it but do not have the financial means. Our interest in computer technologies somehow turned into a business and we learned to work with individual users in very competitive environments. We had tens of thousands of individual customers, and the student friends we sponsored won great prizes. All this is a great pleasure for us. As SAMM Market, money has always been in the background, we think that not making a loss is enough for us. Our goal of serving individual customers, which started with SAMM Market, and with the recommendation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we made a contract with the world’s largest electronic component manufacturer and distributor, Farnell, and we have been working for about 5 years. With a system similar to Alibaba, we supply electronic components at the most affordable prices to all universities, research institutions and individual R&D colleagues. In this field, we are always improving ourselves and making investments in order to provide the best service to tens of thousands of institutions and organizations.
5. What is your local production rate? Do you produce high added value products? Do you serve the Defense Industry?
We started our business life as a distributor company, so we had the opportunity to see who the best customers are, which are the most innovative products, etc. After thoroughly analyzing these, we have been designing and producing products that will compete with the “best” since 2008. We are not yet fully known even in the Turkish market. Our main goal is to develop import substitute products and sell them to the whole world. We also experience some difficulties, for example, we have difficulties in convincing that a Turkish company in data centers in Turkey can be equivalent or even better than those produced in Europe. We are having difficulty in getting a product that we developed in our own R&D and even for which we received incentives from the government, accepted by the data center of the state bank. Isn’t this funny? The government gave us incentives to develop, and we did. But our state institution does not buy from us, it prefers imported products.
Of course, we look for the fault in ourselves first. An engineer in a bank data center might think, “If it’s made in Turkey, it’s definitely missing something.” We will change this perception very soon.
We channeled all our investments into developing and producing value-added products. Currently, our localization rate is at an average of 60%. We have undertaken many valuable projects in the military field and we continue to do so. Even though the fiber optic purchases of defense industry companies such as Roketsan, Aselsan and Tai are at low levels for us and do not save our costs, we support them as much as we can. Because this is what we know. Why would they look for materials from abroad? We also became a shareholder of Kocaeli Defense Inc., which was established under the leadership of Kocaeli Chamber of Industry. We want to be one of the leading companies in the world, not in Turkey, in fiber optics, and we constantly talk about this with our team, maybe we can achieve this in 3-5 years.
While doing this, we “really” apply the classic concept of university-industry cooperation. We cooperate intensively with companies and universities that produce or research High Technology products. Regarding fiber optic sensing, we signed cooperation agreements with Tübitak Bilgem, Gebze Technical University Computer Engineering Department, GOSB Teknopark and most recently Koç University. We have made academic publications and will continue to do so. We have patents belonging to our company, we have applied for new ones. In summary, we have a lot of investments in fiber optic technology, which we think has added value. Of course, feedback from research and development may take time, but we are now very close to this return. When the returns started, we put new ones in order, which means we have made a 10-year plan for our company. We have very good engineers and a good team. Our biggest goal is to achieve greater success over time and contribute to the development of our country.
About Samm Teknoloji
Samm Teknoloji is a manufacturing and engineering company with services in different sectors, especially fiber optic systems and IoT. It has many patents in fiber to the home infrastructure (FTTH) and Data Center equipment, and has developed a wide variety of products in its own field and presented it to the use of the industry.
In addition, it is among the leading companies with its services in turnkey electrical contracting works, heat tracing, and informatics sectors.
Trademarks
Samm, Samm Teknoloji, Foyer, FOTAS are registered Trademarks of SAMM Teknoloji A.S. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.