Miller Magazine Issue: 152 August 2022

71 INTERVIEW MILLER / AUGUST 2022 new generation managers of the company? Our esteemed family elder and deceased grandfather İhsan Aybakar established the Aybakar company in 1932 and start- ed machine production. Later, our father Ferruh Aybakar led the business. The quality, durability and use of the machines made have satisfied the customers. Since then, the highest quality of raw materials used in production has always been selected and highly efficient and sustainable projects have come to life. This ultimately resulted in customer satisfaction. After our father passed away, our mother Hatice Aybakar took over the business. In this process, we, three siblings, gave our mother the best support we could. Our dream since childhood has always been to operate our factory in the mill- ing sector, so we received our training accordingly. Thanks to our French, English, Arabic and Persian education abroad, we are now able to address many geographies. Besides, we have always followed the developing technology and the agenda closely. After we lost our mother at an early age, we three siblings, Mustafa İhsan Aybakar, Sinan Aybakar and Filiz Aybakar, as the third generation, successfully manage the company founded by our grandfather. We plan to continue our business for generations in virtue of our business princi- ples that we learned from our family elders, priorities, relations based on respect and love, rules, mission and vision. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected your indus- try? What kind of change do you observe in the industry? What kind of process do you think awaits the grain pro- cessing industry in the future? The past three years have been quite challenging econom- ically and psychologically all over the world. The world had to livewith a pandemic that humankind have not encountered for a long time, and experienced for the first time by the young- er generation. This situation, in which the world was caught unprepared, created great problems along with chaos and pessimism. The pandemic harmed the milling and machinery industry, as well as many other industries. Mandatory delays in our normal commercial activities, customer visits, exhibitions, and factory installations took place. We hope that all the nega- tive impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, which we can say now has tailed down, will not come back again. However, I can say that the pandemic has also had some positive effects on our workflow models. At the beginning of this process, when coming together physically was not pos- sible, digitalization gathered pace. We started to make our meetings and sales online. We have developed remote inter- vention and solutions for our customers' facilities. We discov- ered the possibilities offered by digitalization. In this process, we also had the opportunity to discuss the issues that we had