Export Disaster, Import Boom!

Hello to everyone,

We are about to be excommunicated from many countries due to faulty and incomplete elevator deliveries abroad. And nobody really seems to care about why this is happening. Everyone is chasing contracts by undercutting the other’s prices. We have become a sector that is continually looted by customers looking for the cheapest of the cheap.

Don’t we have companies that try to carry out their work properly? Of course, we do, but there is no point in writing down those names, which can be counted on the fingers of two hands, and offending other companies. I do not mention the names of the companies, because there is no end to the discussion since nobody is taking the blame.

The same applies for our assembly companies. We have very few companies going abroad for assembly. Yet, the number of companies that do their job properly among them is very, very small.

Currently, there is a serious shortage of assembly crews in the Balkans and Europe. We cannot keep up with the crew demands of elevator companies in Europe. The first reason, unfortunately, is the visa problem! The second problem is foreign languages. We are now at the right time to make money in Europe, but due to material defects, lack of documentation and lack of personal equipment, we cannot truly enjoy the European market. Despite the high demand, especially in the field of modernization, we are unfortunately unable to serve European countries.

China, which recovered again with the end of the pandemic, started to constitute a serious threat to our sector, especially in package elevators. Regardless of figures, we have no chance to compete with China, especially in high-rise and high-speed elevator prices. This situation, naturally, reinforces the power of the big players in the domestic market, but it also has a profound impact on the export market. Even the customers in markets close to us prefer to receive their packages directly from China if they are willing to accept additional delivery time of two to three weeks. In fact, the freight prices of the ships coming out of China these days have become so cheap that the packages including the freight price are almost cheaper than the Turkish prices.

As is the case for rail systems, a high inspection tax should be applied to imported package elevators; otherwise, making money from package elevators sold in the domestic market will be nothing more than a dream. Even more, some of our local assembly companies have accelerated their purchases of package elevators from China. Companies in China have significantly improved themselves in the field of documentation and technical aspects. It is already a country where approximately 1.5 million elevators are produced annually.

This is also true of the demand for escalators. China offers prices that are too challenging to compete against. Although we have two escalator factories in our country, the major players in the sector do not even buy a single escalator. I wish they would also contribute to our industry by placing support orders for these companies.