CEO Message

Our esteemed shareholders, esteemed business partners, and dear Bizim Toptan family,

We are deeply saddened by the earthquake disaster, which had its epicenter in Kahramanmaraş on February 6 and affected 10 of our provinces. I wish God’s mercy on our citizens who lost their lives in this great disaster, patience and condolences to their relatives and all our nation. I have full faith that the wounds of this disaster will be healed quickly with the feeling of unity and solidarity, the strength of our state and the unity of our nation. As Bizim Toptan family, we will continue to work to serve our people in these difficult days.

Another period when we, as Bizim Toptan, worked with a sense of service to our people was undoubtedly 2022. Despite the normalization period that started following the pandemic process we have experienced globally in the past two years, 2022 was a challenging period with uncertainties for the world economy while our country experienced the highest inflation rates in recent years. Despite this challenging process, we reaped fruits of the steps we took in the past two years, and we completed a successful year by working diligently without deviating from our long-term goals. While continuing our work, we maintained our human and service-oriented philosophy. We put our strategic plans into practice by following the trends. I can separate our work in 2022 into groups as our human and future-oriented work, our activities to improve our operations, and steps we took for digitalization.

Our sensitivity to people and the future, as Bizim Toptan, aims to ensure health, safety and continuous development of our customers, business partners and all our employees. Thus, just as we underlined health and safety during the pandemic period, we continued to develop this philosophy in 2022.

2022 has been a year when we improved ourselves in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and became a pioneer in our sector. Throughout the year, we provided a total of 6,234 hours of basic OHS training to all our personnel, with our continuous OHS trainings. Simultaneously, we provided 960 hours of OHS training to our business partners at our construction sites. We created emergency sketches of our 168 stores, prepared our crisis plans for disaster management and conducted our drills. As a matter of fact, thanks to these efforts, we were able to stand strong in emergencies, including the recent earthquake disaster, and continued to serve our people uninterruptedly. As a product of our efforts, we crowned our OHS management system with the TSE ISO 45001 certificate we received during the year.

Our sensitivity to the future directed us to take steps to “work for the future of nature”, which is one of the components of our main partner Yıldız Holding’s sustainability philosophy. Thus, we installed a solar energy system with an installed power of 264 kWp on an area of 1,288 square meters on the roof of our Gebze store.

As of 2023, our Gebze store will produce 107% of its power consumption, that is more power than it needs by using solar energy. We are happy to prevent about 141 tons of carbon emission, what could be cleaned by 6,300 trees in one year.

The activities we undertook during the year to develop our operations ensured growth of our company in terms of both quality and quantity. with the 7 new stores we opened during the year and two stores we relocated, we increased our geographical prevalence to 72 provinces and the total number of our stores to 180.

Our SEÇ Market business partnership model, which is Türkiye’s leading purchasing business partnership model in its area, continued to stand by our merchants with a win-win understanding. We continued to contribute to both national economy and the traditional retail channel with the number of SEÇ Market business partners, which we increased from 1,726 to 2,409 during the year. The SEÇ Market network, located in every city of our country, currently has a share of more than 20% in our sales. I fully believe that the high interest in this model, which makes all its stakeholders, from business partners to customers ”win”, will continue in 2023 and will become much more efficient.

As a result of our company’s agility and its success in keeping up with change, the PROSAF team, which became stronger in alternative channels during the pandemic period, increased both the number of customers and operational reach in 2022 with the normalization of the non-domestic consumption (NDC) sector. We started to conduct our PROSAF operations from our 117 stores. We also launched the digital sales channel following face-to-face and tele-sales methods in order to increase the efficiency of this operation. In 2023, we will strive to further develop the achievements of our PROSAF team in the sector on the NDC channel.

Our development in digital trade continued through the year. Thanks to the mobile application we activated, with our “click & pick up” method we improved existence of physical store experience in the digital. We continued to increase our customer satisfaction score with feedback we received from our customers in both digital and physical store experience. Our target is to carry our already high customer satisfaction score even higher. Our work with this target ensures we can achieve the customer number with which we break our own record every year. Finally in 2022 we renewed our record and carried our number of individual customers to over 2.5 million with 8.1% increase compared to the year before.

We also invested in the supply chain to support our customer number and efficiency of our multi-channel sales model that improves every day. With the main warehouse we opened in Denizli at the end of the year, we increased the number of our warehouses to 4 with Gebze, Adana, and Erzurum.

Another significant investment area in 2022 were doubtlessly our digitalization efforts. in 2022 when we celebrated the 20th year of Bizim Toptan, we moved the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system used since foundation of our company to SAP software. Used broadly all around the world and also by leader retail companies, the SAP software ensured we take a major step towards digitalization.

Using artificial intelligence algorithms, we dynamically analyzed product purchase tendencies, behaviors, demand, and expectations of our customers both on B2B and on B2C side to create exclusive activity suggestions for every one of our customers. Digitalization projects we realized to have an efficient and automation-based infrastructure will continue in 2023 with new additions.

Esteemed Stakeholders,

I must mention that as a unique trade platform in its field, Bizim Toptan is by the side of its customers and trade with its reliable and high-quality products, broad spectrum of products and services, affordable prices and uninterrupted service, aiming to support our national economy. Thanks to our collective synergy, our company grew by 95.7%, our sales excluding cigarette and sugar increased by107%, exceeding our target.

Our company successfully achieved all targets disclosed at Public Disclosure Platform for 2022. This success is owed to our customers who always trusted our quality, our shareholders who support we have always felt beside us, and our employees who perform with dedication from the heart and devotion. With this synergy we create together, in 2023 when we will celebrate the 100 years of our Republic, we will work every day to outdo the day before.

Respectfully,

Hüseyin Balcı
CEO