At this point, it is important to ensure that the sector gets the highest benefit from this transformation. This seems possible with the convergence of the automotive and information technologies sectors at the right time, in the right place, and in the right business regions.

Evaluating the automotive industry in Turkey from a digital transformation viewpoint, it is evident the industry is progressing at a very rapid pace towards its set target. Every day, we encounter many applications with various uses of technology throughout the entire automotive value chain, from the supply industry to the dealers. The most significant driving force behind this is, of course, the customer.

Future consumers are much more demanding; they expect to have products and services are specially designed for them and offered with special content. They want to be able to buy things with their mimics, not just clicks. This is the same whether it's buying trousers, making hotel reservations, or buying a car...

This actually leads us to hand over the helm to the technology component in the automotive industry. In addition to meeting customer needs, the effective use of technology stands out as the way to increase added value in production and export legs in the automotive sector; the customer’s needs and expectations require end-to-end digitization of the industry. Since the product development process begins at the customer, it is inevitable to switch from traditional production ways to technology-oriented production.

In order to achieve digital transformation in the automotive industry, it is necessary to ensure the digitalization of not only the production line of the main industry, but also the channels of access to customers, communication with dealers, and to evaluate with a holistic view everything from suppliers through after-sales services. It is important to use new technology trends and concepts such as cybersecurity, RPA, and Smart Cities effectively in business processes and trading models. For instance, we believe in achieving success in the big picture by grasping the importance of the connection between the vehicles as well as the other objects such as traffic lights and bringing to the fore not only smartization of the automobiles but the cities as well. Similarly, we should design cybersecurity not only as an information technology infrastructure security but also as proactive measures against attacks that production and user data may be exposed to so that we can achieve success in transformation.

All such technologies and their use are vital, but more importantly, we should listen to our customers and make sense of the data we receive from them. At the point we have arrived at today, new data is produced and processed every second. Data is at the heart of all technologies. From the automotive perspective, as many of you know, data is now called the new fuel of automotive. In parallel with the increase in connected devices and internet usage, the amount of data produced in a day has increased 100 times since 2013. Today, 4TB data is obtained from a linked vehicle. This gives an idea of how much the data obtained from the automotive sector will increase in the upcoming period, and we do not even consider the production data here…

At KoçSistem, based on all these "data", we intend to enhance the technological qualifications of organizations from various sectors, equip their workforce, and offer them technological solutions focusing on data analytics and the Internet of Things with KoçDigital, which we have established to make the technology service we provide to our customers more focused. Today, we carry out various projects in the field of IoT & Analytics, from Stock Optimization to Production Information Systems, Assembly Management to Demand Forecasting, for Turkey's largest companies.

Industry 4.0 or whatever we call it, “digitalization in production” should be implemented as quickly as possible because the best time for this was in fact yesterday. It is time to take action, especially the key industrial companies, although they present very good examples in this sense, should increase their efforts even further, and the supply industry should act quickly in order to catch up with the key industry.

We are pleased to witness in various meetings we have held with industry professionals that motivation in the digitalization of the automotive industry is at an extremely high level. In the midst of this transformation, we think that the leadership of our automotive industry, which invests in the future, is also a significant opportunity for the growth of the Turkish economy, and we believe that all gains and values obtained with the digital transformation in the industry will create significant results in the Turkish economy.