Chief Executive Officer, Metals & Mining Division , Yildirim Group of Companies
Prior to joining Yildirim Group as the Metals and Mining CEO and relocating to Istanbul, Dr. Alp Malazgirt lived in Seoul, Korea, where he was an Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Business and worked as a consultant on many high tech projects related to metals and mining. His previous roles and titles in the Far East included Senior Strategist for UT Global, a venture company, and Senior Advisor to Sejong Technology Commercialization Company based in Seoul. Prior to his tenure in the Far East, he was in the USA and had a distinguished career in the Silicon Valley with two silicon chip manufacturing companies. His last position was the Vice President of Global Operations. After 18 years in the high tech field, he started a solar photovoltaic panel company and later was the founder of several service company ventures which are still going strong in California. He has more than 25 years of commercial experience working in the high-tech and management fields and is the recipient of many awards. Dr. Malazgirt has a BS degree in metallurgical engineering from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and an MS from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering with a minor in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of three patents and has published in excess of 20 technical articles and made more than 50 presentations at international venues.
Session 5 - Growth strategies in changing and challenging markets
What makes Kazakhstan attractive to a foreign investor coming from an emerging country?
Kazakhstan identifies itself as a country that has successfully executed the transformational change of turning a Soviet-dominated economy to a very ambitious, pro-private, pro-direct foreign investment country, unlike the other former Soviet countries. One of the strategic sectors, other than oil and gas, is clearly the mineral and metals sector. Kazakhstan is a vast country with unknown but possibly billions of tons of minerals and metals that the world and the global markets need. One of those metals is chromite, of which the world’s highest grades are found in the Aktobe oblast. Hence Yıldırım Group – a global chromite and ferrochrome player based in Istanbul, Turkey – acquired the troubled Voskhod chrome mines in Khromtau, near Aktobe. Cognizant of the fact that distance matters, Yıldırım Group has approached the investment with a thorough due diligence, not only technical but also financial, tax-wise and political.The talk will be based on the pre-acquisition phase that needs to be done, how the pre-integration strategy needs to be defined, the types of resources and professional assistance and guidance that is needed to achieve the desired results. The talk will also include the proposed plans to realize a good return on investment, not only for the company that made the huge investment, but also for the local community and the local welfare of the people and the Kazakh government. And lastly, certainly not the least, is the fact that the social corporate responsibility of Yıldırım Group is not to import people from Turkey or elsewhere but to improve the local content of the Kazakh people in the region, to improve the mining, equipment and maintenance know-how of the workforce by employing the local people and again improving the tax pace of the local community in Khromtau and the Aktobe oblast. By achieving a high level of satisfaction in addition to the already warm and friendly culture between the Kazakhs and this Turkish company, Yıldırım Group will be able to achieve a sustainable, long-lived social license to operate the mine.