What have you achieved as the CFO of Enerjisa Enerji over the past two years+? How has your work impacted the performance of Turkey’s biggest energy company?
I am very happy and proud of our teams as we have achieved together a lot in these turbulent times of inflation of above 80%:
• Share price improvement by more than 300%.
• Grew heavily all KPIs such as operational earnings, net income, EBITDA and free cash flow and accelerated green funding.
• Increased the business profitability by revamping all business segments and accelerated green growth.
• We further de-risked our business in a demanding macro environment (volatility regarding FX, inflation, GDP, CDS and interest rates).
• Initiated sustainability as the fundament of the corporate strategy, centering the business model on digitisation and the new energy world and sharpening the company’s purpose, vision, mission and business strategy.
• And we accelerated innovations such as chatbots and speech analytics
As an energy company, you have a large infrastructure base and a substantial amount of yearly investments. How do you make sure that your capital allocation and supply chain activities are in line with your ESG strategy?
As an energy company operating the country’s largest power grid, we are one of the main investors in Turkey. We make sure that our strategy and vision are aligned with our allocation of capital, to ensure that each Lira invested supports the future energy world that we are aiming to bring to fruition. That is what we believe a company, who truly has sustainability and ESG embedded in their business model does. Therefore, we do not invest in any energy production that is run on fossil fuels. Instead, we invest heavily in providing customers with green electricity. Every year we invest 3-5 billion Turkish Lira to build out the energy grid and modernise it so it can integrate all new renewable sources without causing any blackouts for customers. We make sure that all our investments are carried out in a sustainable manner, which is something we also hold all parties in our value chain accountable for, meaning that also our subcontractors are obliged to follow our code of conduct. In this sense, we differentiate between green capex and regular capex and are always pushing for an increasing proportion of green capex.
You are also recognised for your initiatives in shaping Enerjisa’s governance, risk management and thereby restructuring its operational units and readjusting its business models. What is your secret?
Before growing a business, the fundament needs to be strengthened. The backbone of every business is its financial leeway, a strong balance sheet, a healthy net debt ratio and a balanced capital structure. The company’s risk framework should thereby consider the three lines of defence appropriately: Operational Management, Risk Management & Compliance Functions and Internal Audit. As a stock-listed company, we need to take special care of all of this to guarantee proper governance. This is in fact nothing new and surprising. We are only doing this with a high level of prudence, or what I call the basic homework. This is extra needed in times of enormous macro volatility.
It is great to see a CFO pushing ESG. What have been some of your sustainability achievements so far?
As we fully position our efforts in the direction of improving all areas of ESG every day, it is a long-term journey. Nevertheless, we are very proud of our early achievements: Enerjisa is now included in BIST sustainability index, which includes companies trading on Borsa Istanbul with the best corporate sustainability performance. Enerjisa received a Corporate Governance Rating Score of 9.46 out of 10 and it retained its place on the BIST Corporate Governance index as one of the companies with the highest corporate governance rating. Our Sustainability Report has received several awards and our CDP score jumped from D to B.
Awards are wonderful recognitions for our achievements but in fact, only our actions going forward are decisive. In this sense, Enerjisa is heavily investing in networks as the basis infrastructure of the new clean energy world. On top of that, emobility plays an important role in our investments as well as investing in products that support a clean and more sustainable future.
