Alpke Offers Special Solutions to Its Customers with Its Engineering Team

Alpke is proud to be the brand that gives confidence to its customers with its brand perception in the sector as well as its perspective on quality and marketing. We talked with Alpke Export Manager Fahri Eryılmaz about the future plans and critical change in the sector.

Can you tell us about yourself?

I was born in Berlin and graduated from Yıldız Technical University, Department of Electrical Engineering in 1999. I worked as a project manager at Siemens for 6 years and also continued my postgraduate education in Germany during this period.

After returning to Turkey, I worked as a project manager in an international company that had made a Joint Venture with a Belgian company. Our field of activity was to manufacture coils of high-voltage motors and generators. It was also to ensure that affordable costs were created in the coils to be used in the maintenance and repair of engines and generators abroad.

Alpke As How was he born?

Production and sales are realized in companies that produce wire in the sector; however, I saw that there was a lack of technical aspects and exports. On this occasion we established a joint company with a manufacturing company: ALPKE

While establishing Alpke, we took care that we had a manufacturing leg and bought a producer partner. At first we weren't thinking about production. Our partner, who is a manufacturer, made production, and we sold it. Over time, we started to fill the production volume of our manufacturer partner. After a while, we agreed with our manufacturer partner and bought his shares. So we started to produce the product that we technically know well.  

What kind of production and service do you provide?

We are present at every point where there is a coil. We produce coil wires. We supply products to companies that produce transformers. Transformer manufacturers and repairers, engine manufacturers and repairers, welding machine manufacturers, uninterruptible power supply manufacturers, in short, our products are used in every environment where electromagnetic fields need to be created.

What Makes Your Products Different?

We manufacture flat, round, aluminum and copper wire. Of course, there is a different structure from the normal wires that come to mind when it comes to wires. The biggest feature of our products is that they are materials with high purity and high conductivity.In fact, we have reached 99.99% purity in copper. Our purity rate in aluminum is 99.7%.

We provide insulation by wrapping the wires in band to isolate them. We have automatic machines that make these windings. In addition, we completely glue a copper material together by wrapping glass fiber wires around copper, varnishing them and powdery mildew in ovens. Although these processed wires are bent 180 degrees, they do not cause tearing or any trouble. Another material makes pots though. The mechanical durability of our products needs to be high. The presence of a tear in the coils during bending means that the material explodes. I can say that we produce the heart of transformers and motors here.

In our laboratories, we put our products through all the test stages. We also send these test reports to our customer. What is conductivity and tensile stress? What is insulation? Here, it is the insulation material on it that provides the tensile stress. Each material has a bearing capacity. We always produce above the demanded value. This is an indicator of the quality of our products.In principle, no product with a value below 580 Volts should be sent to the customer. You don't have a measurement lab, and saying "I covered it, I sent it" doesn't work.Maybe there was the same quality of production, but since there is no test phase, neither you nor your customer can know it.

What Is The Biggest Feature That Sets You Apart From Other Manufacturers?

Our Quality Control unit considers products with values below 580 volts as absolutely faulty products and attaches a red label on them saying "cannot be sent to the customer". So that a wrong and faulty product does not go to our customer. Many companies we work with test the products we send in their laboratories in accordance with ISO standards. We share our production stages with our customers moment by moment. We say, "The product has been produced but has not yet passed such and such tests, give us a few more days and we will send this product to you with the desired feature." Knowing all these elongation, elasticity, conductivity, breakage, tensile capacity of copper, you should send the material to your customer. As I said above, our products are the heart of this business. There should be no problem with the products we give.

What do you think is competition?

What is important for us is Quality competition. We are expensive compared to our competitors. We do not enter into price competition, we enter into quality competition.Customers who prefer quality are not surprised by us.

Where are your target markets?

Europe is our target. We have great advantages in terms of price competition with Europe. Our closest competitors in Europe are Italy and Bulgaria. But they, too, are dealing with their own economic situation. That's why we have a lot of exports to Romania, Bulgaria and Europe. Our competitors in Europe do not have the opportunity to compete with us in terms of price. Our advantage is that our labor is cheap.Even these exchange rate increases are coming to our benefit. Our workmanship is in dollar and Euro terms and every increase is reflected in our earnings.

What is the Weight of your product groups?

We have both products that we manufacture and sell and products that we trade. We have sales of enamel coil wires at home and abroad. We also make coating in line with customer demand.We take flat enamel copper wire. We make coatings with various insulation materials on it and send it. Our goal is to provide a collective solution to our customers domestically. What our customer buys from us, buys wire, buys insulation material from another place, buys other parts from another place. We set goals to provide the service of all these from a single place.

How many countries do you export to?

We have exports to thirty countries. We don't have customers in every country. You look at Africa, it is a huge continent, but your customer is in the western parts, and there are energy investments developing there.In order to be our customer, there must be a transformer manufacturer. Our country is very rich in terms of transformer production, and we have a lot of customer potential. From here, I can easily say this: Turkey has become a center of substation production. The biggest transformer productions of world brands are in Turkey.Our domestic producers are also very strong, and serious exports are made to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

How is your technical staff formed?

Our technical team; It consists of young but experienced friends who have trained themselves well in their profession. We serve transformers. We wanted to; Let our engineer friends who work in us have the transformer infrastructure. That's why the guys in our planning team are asking us to find out where the materials we produce are? How? Why? Since they know very well that it will be used, they analyze and control the properties of the material very well and ship them to our customers.

We have a structure that thinks in parallel with the customer. We are the seller, we understand very well what the transformer manufacturer who bought this wire from us feels, how he thinks. This allows for a more harmonious work with the customer. I can say that our quality control manager is the best in our country when it comes to coil wires. Recalling the features in some specifications from our corporate customers, we have developed a product for them and say that if we make the overlays like this, you will get a better result. In this case, the specifications are also reviewed and even changed.

In our logic, we act with the understanding of continuous development and providing different services by having a technical and engineer staff. We wanted to work with those who know the business.

What kind of service do you offer domestically?

We stand out in terms of delivery and quality at home as well as abroad. Among our customers, our name is referred to as quality and speed. We produce the best quality, we ship the fastest. No one comes and looks at the production process except our corporate customers, we want everyone to come and see the manufacturing process on site. After we start working with us, no one leaves us. The important thing is that the quality and supply are continuous. So much so that we bought more Generators than we needed for the continuity of production in our factory.

Will you have fair participations in 2019?

The most important fair of our sector is the Berlin fair, and we are definitely going to this.

Sec. We would like to thank them very much for the interview with Fahri Eryılmaz.