Koreans are coming !!

Dear Colleagues

Title reminds us the famous film "Russians are coming!" It is almost same but the player countries are different.

Last week, Korean Company Doosan came to Ankara in order to meet with reputable local companies private and public.

They asked me to help them. So I asked appointment from top management of public companies, EUAS, TEDAS, TEIAS etc.

Our Public companies have the similar attitute these days. They say "since we should get 3- offers and evaluate for almost 3-months for each bolt we need, we cannot finalise any investment in the modern times in a reasonable short period of time. Therefore we ask private investors to make the investment. We expect the maximum rental fee for our treasury." Good point, good thinking, very logical.

We also asked private companies for mutual meetings for future cooperation. Most of them accepted and invited us to their head offices. That was almost no cost for them other than some business time to allocate

On both sides, we had almost similar presentations.



First Doosan introduced their colorful hardcopy documentation, their home country references of various thermal power plants, as well as nuclear

Their international experiences, reference plants in the Middle East

However these documentation was explained with relatively poor verbal English

In response our local companies explained how wonderful work they do in local and/or international environments

Surprisingly Turkish scope covered only civil works and site installation, plus maybe some construction of administration buildings / some catering. That was all.

Most of our companies donot have courage to exceed these simple activities. These are simple, hardwork with minimum cost, almost with minimum value added value.

It is so sad to say that our companies cannot handle basic engineering, they cannot handle overall leadership. They donot have single thermal power plant reference as turnkey EPC contractor in the local market

So we all handle the hardwork, whereby our international partners get the biggest portion of the scope and profit.

The Koreans were at the lowest life style in 1950s in the Korean war and at that time we sent our troops to save them. After 50 years, their GNP is almost twice of ours now

Doosan has turnkey engineering and complete project leadership capability. They constructed all their thermal power plants by themselves. Similarly they constructed many nuclear power plants in Korea under license.

They have the same software and hardware available as elsewhere, and they purchased the necessary technical licence to handle design works of all types thermal power plants

They recently signed a license agreement with Foster Wheeler of USA to contruct CFB boilers to fire all types od pood quality lignite.

In the international markets, today US or UK companies, German/ Frech/ Italian companies are too expensive

On the other hand China, Indian, Korean companies are relatively cheaper in turn key EPC contracts

If we do not show our engineering expertise, our market will soon be dominated by these East world and local companies will be doing only the hard simple work.

All we need is courage, at least within our own environment. We should start to contruct our own thermal power plants by ourselves.

Foreign companies cannot design, contruct power plants to fire our special lignite

Only Turkish engineers can do it, since we live all our life with these local fuel.

Our local private companies are to decide if they will continue to have simple works all the time, and vanish,

or make drastic change and start doing new investments on engineering talent by supplying the engineering staff with appropriate software and hardware, plus necessary technical licensing, to enable their companies work as turnkey EPC contractor as leading company

That is the most important key decision now.