Turkey’s Gama to focus on Africa, Asia as energy projects slow down in neighbors

“We have set Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Angola, Mozambique, Kenya and the South Africa as the target markets. We have been closely following the projects there. Some 10,000 MW of the 2015 projects were contracted in the Middle East and some 3,000 MW in Africa. We believe investments will rise in Africa. We established a company in Mozambique in this vein,” said Gama Power Systems CEO Özgür Umut Eroğlu, while also underlining Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam as appealing markets, in addition to Iran.

Gama Holding’s engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) unit which focuses on energy projects, has undertaken around 8,000 megawatts (MW) of power plant construction projects, half of which are in Turkey and the other half abroad. 

“We have seen a dramatic shrinkage in the global sector for the last seven or eight years. After the 2008 global economic burst, the whole sector has started to slow down and this trend has never ended,” said Eroğlu. 

“While the total power capacity of the power plant projects, which were inked in 2008 in Africa, Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Russia, Turkey and the Middle East, were around 40,000 MW, this figure dropped to almost one-third of the 2008 levels in 2015 to around 16,000 MW,” he said. 

Eroğlu noted that the company had succeeded in increasing its market share from 4 to 12 percent in the period despite the global slowdown. 

He said the company had become one of the top 10 EPC companies specializing in power plant development with around 10 contracts, which are worth around $6 billion. 

Noting that the sector had almost stopped across Europe with very few new projects, Eroğlu said the potential for new investment in Turkey had dropped significantly, although there are current licenses applications with more than 30,000 MW of capacity. “The deceleration is also the case in Russia and the CIS region. New investments are being made in only a few Middle Eastern countries, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. There is a huge potential in Egypt, but as a Turkish company, we weren’t able to enter the market.

Iraq is a good market but has security and other problems,” he said.