“You cannot truly own anything you have not paid the price for. And if you get it without paying, you will never savour it.”
A childhood spent between the cooking pots
Şinasi Güneş was born in 1963 in the village of Hacıali, in the Mustafakemalpaşa district of Bursa, the son of a small farmer who had come from Ardahan. The wind blew through every gap of their house and the roof leaked in many places when it rained. His mother would put pots under the drips, and he slept curled up between them.
He was a bright pupil at primary school. His teacher asked his father to let him continue his education and offered to cover every expense. But the next morning he was back with the sheep; he never went to secondary school and carried on as a shepherd.
Electricity came to the village and changed his life
In the 1970s electricity reached the village. His cousins were doing the wiring, and he started working beside them as an apprentice. Seeing a lamp light up after pulling two cables fascinated him: “I have to learn this,” he said. In the following years he worked for electricians in Mustafakemalpaşa, Bursa and Istanbul.
During military service he became head of the camp’s electrical team and passed the electrician’s licence exam that vocational school graduates had failed. When he was reprimanded because a machine ran in reverse at a concrete-pouring ceremony, he found the answer himself: a phase-inverter plug that swaps the phase order with a screwdriver. Sparing people that kind of trouble became the starting point of the products he would later make.
Laboratory by day, taxi by night
After his service he took on the electrical contracting of a five-star hotel in Antalya single-handedly. When the economy turned at the end of the 1980s, he loaded his remaining materials onto a truck and brought them to Bursa. While trying to sell them on Gazcılar, the street of electricians, a manufacturer told him: “We don’t need materials, we need a technician like you.” He started as head of the laboratory.
He soon rose to head of production. In the evenings he drove a taxi; for about two and a half years he worked on four or five hours of sleep and saved money. He did not yet know what he would do, but his urge to make something was, in his own words, “like a volcano”.
Three products, 60 square metres and a conviction
After five and a half years he found the courage to manufacture on his own. He identified three models the market wanted but nobody fully supplied, went from one mould maker to the next and bargained. When his money ran short he borrowed from friends and family and put in everything he had. In 1994, in a 60-square-metre workshop, he founded Bursa Elektrik Malzemeleri İmalat Sanayi – BEMİS.
When he brought the samples home, his wife asked, “Who is going to buy these?” His friends reacted the same way. He ignored the criticism and kept going. Today he says of the same products with a smile: “Bakers keep up with the demand for bread; we cannot keep up with the demand for plugs and sockets.”
- 1963
- born in the village of Hacıali
- 1994
- founded BEMİS
- 3
- products to start with
- 60m2
- first workshop
From Bursa to every continent
Today BEMİS is an integrated, 100% domestic manufacturing facility in the Bursa Organized Industrial Zone, handling every stage in-house, from design and mould making to injection, assembly and shipping. Industrial plugs and sockets, cable reels, distribution boards, energy transfer drums and electric vehicle charging products are shipped from the Americas to Africa, from Europe to Central Asia.
For a new tunnel in Switzerland, products were selected not on their certificates but by testing in the government’s own laboratory; among samples collected from around the world, BEMİS products were accepted. In Turkey, BEMİS products are used in many facilities, from the defence industry and the nuclear power plant to automotive plants and major public projects.
Success is not only about making money
For Şinasi Güneş, success means giving people work and a livelihood, exporting and bringing foreign currency into the country. Money only has meaning when it comes on top of these. His advice to young people comes from the same place: those who do not pay the price with their own effort never savour what they gain.
“In life nobody works for anybody else; everyone works for themselves.”
We are moving forward with confidence on our path to becoming a global brand.