In 2019, when we were at the Jaipur Fair, we were giving away our new issue. At that moment a new firm caught our eye and we went to their stand. Then we started having a conversation, and they ended up saying “We want to advertise in your magazine.” That’s how our four-year-old friendship started with Timemar. It’s such an happiness for us to be able to observe every step the company takes under the partnership between Özçağ Aydın and Emine Çetinkaya. Starting as a block exporter, the company opened a quarry with its sister firm Heyma. And we’ve decided to feature this new brand’s adventure in our newest issue. Özçağ Aydın is a mining engineer who started working in the sector when he was a new graduate in 2006. He worked as a quarry chief for five years at a quarry in his hometown, Denizli, and was R&D responsible. From the sales department to the marketing adviser, he worked in each department of the quarry.
Emine Çetinkaya, however, comes from a different background. She studied econometrics and her first encounter with natural stones was a coincidence. Her adventure, which started in the exports department of a quarry in Burdur, continues at her own quarry. That’s how Timemar Mining was founded in 2015, with the dreams of two entrepreneurs. Concentrating on block export to China and India, the firm set sail for new targets in 2019. Strengthening its brand and starting production with new investments, Timemar opened its first quarry in Burdur. Hearing the footsteps of the beige trend in the sector after the grey, two partners opened a beige quarry in Burdur.
Özçağ Aydın informs us about their targets in the upcoming period, “We’ve operated with our own quarry for 3 years. In order to have a more scientific approach, we examine the area and evaluate every single detail with our R&D department before starting production. We study the tomography of the area with geophysics methods and we take samples from the areas that we detect with core drilling. If the studies yield good results, we speed up the process. We planned to grow in this field and concentrated on our R&D studies. We have 12 licenses. Our priority is to open a white quarry in Muğla and a grey quarry in Karaman next year. We also speeded up the process to build a factory, due to the fact that the market will be more active in Turkey owing to the pandemic conditions. We’ve made applications to open a factory in the industrial district of Burdur.”
We asked Emine Çetinkaya about the advantages of being a woman in the sector. In the natural stone sector, a lot of women are employed in different departments, especially in exportations. However, there are so few women owning the whole business. Çetinkaya told that women pay more attention to the details and said, “This sector is a field dominated by men. For some people it’s strange. However, women pay always more attention to the details. They examine every single detail. That is our biggest advantage. I like the production, block breaking, factory operations, and everything about my business.”
Last but not least, the block market. We asked about the slowing down in China and the latest situation in the Indian market. The company partners concluded their words, “The overflowing stocks in China have been a problem for a long time. Then the pandemic broke out and caused economical problems. We think that China will continue the same for at least two years. And India is trying to fill this gap. Indians are believed to be so picky, however, we have Indian clients that buy all the blocks before we wash them. We’ve made an observation during our visits to India. Their government supports such projects, and they invest in Italian machinery. We detected project-making companies instead of block buyers. We were following them closely, and that started paying off during the pandemic. Now our operations are based on projects and architects. In the last quarter of 2021, we started residence and mall projects with Bianco, which is a stone from our quarry. It is an exciting project with 82 thousand square meters of marble. Finally, we can say that our main problem is that the customer comes to us with his 10 cm stone, and we try to produce that stone. So we work with our unreplaceable resources to satisfy the customers’ needs. And this decreases the profitability of our quarries and increases our production costs. Whereas Italians first serve the stone, then the project is formed according to the stone. We need to get over these problems.”
