-: Today, I am very pleased to be together
with Sitare Sezgin, CEO of Teknosa.
Sitare, thank you for coming
and thank you for allocating your time
to talk about Teknosa's transformation
journey with us. Welcome.
-: Thank you, Asli. It's always a pleasure to be with you.
-: Teknosa is going through a big transformation.
Would you start by explaining
how this transformation journey started
and what you did in the first part?
-: Of course. Teknosa is Turkey's leading electronics
retailer, and it is the most well-known and most reputable
and most trusted brand in the electronics retail there.
We needed to strengthen our retail muscles.
We had to transform our operations in order
to improve our financial performance.
So as you mentioned,
we started a holistic turnaround together with BCG,
and when people talk about, of course, transformation,
especially loss-making companies, generally, the
first thing that comes to mind is a dramatic cost reduction.
But what we did was both boosting the top line and
improving operational and financial efficiency.
This top-line transformation of Teknosa was one of the,
I think, key building blocks of the success.
Would you please continue for what you did
in the next phases?
-: We introduced some mechanisms
to improve our cost discipline,
and we achieved savings in advance in financial
and administrative expenses.
But what we did, we used these resources
to increase our sales staff
to deploy the optimum inventory of our stores as well as
to improve our incentive schemes.
So our end-to-end financial
and operational transformation took us
to a profit-generating company in less than a year.
The exciting thing was this turnaround gave us the right
to build a new Teknosa,
starting with the launch of the Teknosa Marketplace
and continuing with a new comprehensive
digital-driven transformation.
-: Marketplace was such a bold decision.
It wasn't easy to make,
I know. We had big discussions,
but I think it was a bold decision.
And congratulations on that.
What made you take this decision?
How did you see the Marketplace opportunity?
-: Actually, Marketplace was one
of the top transformative steps that we have taken.
It initiated our journey to become a digital platform
with a physical presence
that we call ourself a digital retailer. Like everywhere
else across the world,
the shift to online has accelerated in the Turkish
electronics retailing after Covid,
and consumers are especially seeking trust when it comes
to big-ticket purchases.
So in the Teknosa Marketplace model, what we are doing, we
are only working with top- quality and trusted merchants,
and Teknosa acts as an ecosystem moderator and
guarantees trust and seamless and reliable customer
experiences. We had a very fast
and a very successful launch in February 2022,
and since then, we have been improving our Marketplace.
-: I remember those days.
It was a very fast-paced implementation.
Would you share some numbers to put it into perspective?
-: When we say fast, it is really fast.
It was less than six months.
To date, our marketplace features almost 1,000 active
sellers with more than 150,000 products.
That means that our product offering has expanded 30 times
in number of SKUs.
Marketplace capability has actually positively impacted
our overall online e-commerce business.
Our traffic and online sales volume almost doubled
in less than two years.
-: And of course with this, you
are now building the new Teknosa, the future of
Teknosa, and what does it look like?
-: Now, we have a big ambition to make
Teknosa a digital-first company,
and to achieve this ambition, we are putting digitalization
and artificial intelligence into the core
of our transformation journey.
We're introducing an AI- based sales assistant tool
to support our salesforce.
Also, we are planning
to use AI again in assortment optimization
and later, markdown optimization.
Last but not least,
we are also transforming our technology,
our technological infrastructure,
to really make Teknosa a digital-first company.
We are transforming our ERP
and also our data-management capabilities.
-: And we talk a lot about the "What" part
of the transformation. In BCG transforming,
we look at the transformations with two lenses.
One is the "What" part,
and the other one is the "How" part, which is
as important as the "What" part.
How did you make sure
that your team members embrace this transformation?
Actually, the whole transformation is
a big cultural shift for Teknosa
from a top-line-oriented company.
Now we are an impact-oriented company.
Now each and every member of Teknosa
thinks about the ultimate impact
of their decisions and actions.
Thank you, Sitare. Thank you, Asli.
It's always been a real pleasure together working with you.