“Turkish Flexibility and German Virtues Propelled Us to Market Leadership!”
Interview with Aziz Yüzer, CEO of LY-Holding GmbH
LY-Holding GmbH consists of close to a dozen individual companies which provide high-quality cleaning and support services for many of the world’s major tire manufacturers. CEO Aziz Yüzer explained to European Business how his company grew from its humble beginnings in southern Germany into a truly global enterprise which employs more than 2,200 people today.
European Business: Mr. Yüzer, LY-Holding GmbH has been providing a wide variety of services for the tire industry for many years and consists of close to a dozen individual companies with distinct service portfolios. What would you say is the main focus of your daily business?
Aziz Yüzer: By and large, we are experts in automated tire mold cleaning and related fields. Thus, our holding company also comprises many individual firms which provide systematic cleaning services for reusable containers and produce dry ice for use in relevant cleaning procedures. Besides, we also offer rubber sealing and assembly services as well as high-quality bladders for heating presses, while our extensive expertise and experience allow us to develop and manufacture special machines and automation solutions for the industries we are active in. Additionally, we provide tailor-made repair services for tire manufacturers and we also trade in steel and construction elements so that we can support our partners and customers as holistically as possible.
European Business: Why do your clients prefer to outsource these services to LY-Holding instead of conducting them in-house?
Aziz Yüzer: Tire manufacturers focus on developing and producing high-quality tires – that’s what they want to devote their attention and resources to. The cleaning and support services we provide are necessary so they can achieve these aims; at the same time, they are clearly of secondary importance to them. They want to have as little to do with these tasks as possible, which is why they were looking for an effective partner that can provide these services in a reliable fashion and consistently at a high quality. LY-Holding has been very successful in developing great expertise in this field and has attained a resilient leadership position in the market.
European Business: How have you been able to achieve this status?
Aziz Yüzer: We continuously improve the technologies we have invented and never cease to come up with new ones. At first, the cleaning services we offered largely relied on manual labor. Over the years, we were able to automate many of them. Now, we have successfully developed a new laser system for which we were granted a patent and which allows us to serve our customers in an even more comprehensive way than before. Besides, from our humble beginnings in the Odenwald region of southern Germany, we quickly expanded our operations globally and are active in virtually all major markets in the world today – from Indonesia and Turkey to Mexico and Brazil. Our customers boast truly global operations networks as well – and thus need a partner who can support them with an equally global approach.
European Business: In spite of your successful automation innovations, LY-Holding currently employs approximately 2,200 people – in which way is your company exposed to the challenges that come with the wide-spread skilled labor shortage most European companies have had to face for many years?
Aziz Yüzer: Undoubtedly, this is one of the major challenges we are currently confronted with. One particularly problematic impediment we encounter in this context lies in the extraordinarily stringent and cumbersome immigration procedures we have to deal with, primarily in Germany. For instance, we employ a great number of highly skilled engineers and computer programmers at our plant in Turkey who we would like to transfer to our company headquarters in Germany. All of them easily fulfill the requisite legal requirements, but it takes several months to obtain appointments for them at the foreigners’ registration offices in Germany or the German consulates abroad. At the same time, these people’s skills are desperately needed here – and our company is just one example of this major problem that virtually all mid-sized organizations across the country face every day. What is so frustrating is that essentially, all the laws needed to alleviate this situation are in place, but navigating the bureaucratic requirements still takes so much needless time and effort. When I had a chance to speak to the German Chancellor a few months back, I made a point of raising this issue with him, because it is tremendously important – not just for us, but for the German economy and its opportunities for future growth as a whole.
European Business: Founded in 1987 by your Turkish family and a German partner, LY-Holding has been a multicultural endeavor from the very beginning – in what ways has this perspective shaped your company?
Aziz Yüzer: The owner of our local newspaper once described us as a match made in heaven: From the start, we were able to build upon German engineering and business virtues as well as a Turkish sense of flexibility and customer orientation. Even though our company has grown substantially since those early days, we have consistently maintained strong horizontal organizational structures so that we can quickly adapt to new market developments and untapped customer needs. This customer-centric approach has been of pivotal importance for our success and will continue to be so in the years to come.