Tamy received a lot of Konichiwas
The show in Istanbul just ended today leaving us with a feeling of hope. Turkiye is one of the important markets of the security industry; made strong by its geographical location, vastness and economic power. ISAF attracted vendors from various sectors from CCTV, fire security, turnstiles, gates, etc and biometrics certainly is not a novel technology in this show. People are already familiar with this solution or at least know that fingerprint products are available.
The main challenge now is finding a right partner which could carry FingerTec's brand essence without compromising on price factor significantly.
And I received a lot of "Are you a muslim?" question. :)
The first and second day of the show were rather slow on Hall 10, where we were located along with the fire security companies, as compared to Hall 9, which was a little bit happening with some songs on loudspeakers. The next two days were much better for us. Everybody was looking to view the price list and not so much on the product specifications. The fact that China made products have been flooding the Istanbul market made our price seems a bit on the higher side. This fact needed some explanation and our audiences understood the fact after being presented with the resources we offer them as our resellers. Interestingly, unlike many other places we've been to, many are interested to become resellers to a Turkish distributor. They are willing to pay higher price rather than dealing with importation of products from abroad. We find this situation quite unique as compared to many countries that always want to be distributors despite how low the quantity of their orders. :)
The show started to draw on crowds on the weekend
This time we didn't hire any translator because the one that came to work didn't know English. She understands Turkish and understands English (as what she signaled to me) but she couldn't speak any English except "so-so" and then she flashed a big smile to us. We had to send her back without any replacement. And surprisingly, people who are interested to deal with us came back with their translator to make things easy for both parties. Marketing your products in English in Turkey is a no-brainer. It is our mission to find a partner that can communicate in English but we will definitely do our marketing and resources in Turkish to capture this market. Translations of our software and hardware in Turkish are done so far and we will move on to other data sheets and materials. We already made a few acquaintances in Turkey to assist us on good translations.
ISAF is definitely a good platform for the security industry and we are proud to be apart of this growing market. All we could do now is to be hopeful that we could secure a good partner that could bring FingerTec to a greater height in this great country. Any party interested, please email me at info@fingertec.com.
by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ
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