Message from the Chairman
Our esteemed shareholders, business partners, and employees,
2024 was a year when economic and sectoral challenges were felt in retail and wholesale sectors. Our merchants in the sector were also affected by this situation.
We took action to adjust at this environment that affect demand conditions and to increase our operational efficiency.
As Türkiye’s most extensive organized wholesale grocery store, we are among most important pieces of a broad ecosystem including hundreds of institutions and companies, thousands of merchants and individual customers from all around Türkiye. Throughout 2024 we continued making required strategic investments to carry our customer-focused service understanding further. With our investments in stores we continued to contribute to the economy and employment. The number of our Bizim Toptan stores was 182 as of the end of the year while the number of SEÇ Markets in our ecosystem became 2,531 and the number of warehouses that serve to our entire organization became 13.
We continue to work to improve customer experience. The most concrete example of this was our 5 new stores we opened under “Bizim Gross” name. In these stores we present our individual customers ease of shopping with broad variety of products. At large and spacious Bizim Gross stores we present to our customer a broad variety of products different than classical Bizim Toptan stores from vegetables-fruits to meat and meat products, from open deli products to warm bakery and cafe products.
2024 was a year when we reinforced our leadership in out-of-home (OOH) consumption sector and strengthened our consolidation actions. With integration of our g2m company we took over in 2023 the services and our product portfolio in OOH consumption sector broadened. We consolidated our Profas micro distribution business with g2m in a way to use our distribution network more efficiently and present our customer with a broader product portfolio. We believe that this consolidation will accelerate our growth in the coming years.
With increasing cost pressure and challenging economic conditions in 2024, optimization became one of our most important priorities in all our activity chain. With our cold storage optimization project we ensured advantage in both rent and distribution cost in our logistics processes while also ensuring a more rapid, effective, and efficient structure.
As a company that has long been investing to reinforce its digital infrastructure, in 2024 we continued order processes with digital infrastructure at Seç and g2m, we also undertook e-trade with our “click&pick up” application from our stores.
Our dealership business model Seç Market, that support traditional merchants continued its support of the economy with its affordable label and private label product supply in 2024 when purchasing power of customers were affected.
We learned important lessons from challenges our sector experienced. Many variables that are difficult to foresee such as increase in logistics, energy, and labor costs and cost pressure, rapidly changing customer behaviors, occasional fluctuations in supply chain showed us once again the importance of flexibility, optimization and innovation for the sector. Thanks to our strong organizational structure, vast experience in the sector, and dynamic team, we took important steps to overcome such challenges.
As Bizim Toptan we will focus on expanding/diversifying our network of stores, increasing efficiency, reinforcing our digital infrastructure, and increasing customer satisfaction in the coming period to continue our leadership in the sector. With “Wasteless Company” principle of Yıldız Holding, sustainability will continue to be at the focus of our business.
I would like to thank all our stakeholders employees, and customers that walk with us on this path.
Respectfully,
Cengiz Solakoğlu
Bizim Toptan Satış Mağazaları A.Ş.
Chairman of Board of Director