February 07, 2017•Update: February 07, 2017
By Muhammed Ali Gurtas
ANKARA
Keeping track of over 10 million door numbers, almost a million kilometers of road and 2.5 million points of interest would be a challenge for any mapmaker but one Turkish firm is supplying such information to giant mapping services like Google and Yandex.
Ahmet Dabanli, deputy general manager of Basarsoft (Mapbis), speaking to Anadolu Agency, said the company, which provides detailed smart-grid mapping of Turkey street-by-street and town-by-town, was making strategic partnerships to become a global brand.
“Ninety percent of Basarsoft’s revenues come from our genuine value-added products and services. We believe that the company has accomplished its targets in Turkey. It’s time to extend our success to the world,” Dabanli said.
Dabanli said the 20-year-old company succeeded in meeting its founding target to produce working, successful, sustainable systems to reduce Turkey’s foreign dependency to a minimum.
“At the beginning, Google and Yandex tried to get Turkey’s maps from foreign companies. But then they realized that our services were better quality than the traditional foreign companies," he added.
According to the company, in Turkey there are more than 10 million door numbers, around 2.5 million points of interest among over 400 categories, 0.7 million kilometers of road with over four million pieces of linking information included in Mapbis’s services.
"Mapbis is certainly not standing behind the West in mapping. We even provide more advantageous options than our foreign competitors using the old methods and demonstrating relatively slow progress in technology update due to costs," Dabanli said.
"We definitely want to evaluate business opportunities abroad since we know that Mapbis systems are easier, faster and more accessible," he added.
Dabanli said the company's first overseas project was for the municipality of Medina in Saudi Arabia, an end-to-end city mapping.
Mapbis also did business in Albania and Iraq and has project-based partners in the U.S., Europe, Morocco, South Africa and some Gulf countries.
"We are planning to open an office in the U.S. this year because we have to take our place in Silicon Valley to bring Mapbis to a certain level in the world," Dabanli said.
The company currently gets 15 percent of its revenues from abroad and is aiming to increase this to around 50 percent in three years.
A-to-Z mapping
Dabanli said street maps in Turkey were limited to tourist guides for major cities before Mapbis entered the sector.
"From one end to other edge, for the first time, our company worked in the same quality due to a great need in Turkey. We produced A-to-Z maps of the country," Dabanli added.
The company matches its studies with demographic information from the Turkish Statistical Institution.
"In our maps, you can find every detail like up-to-date street names, direction of the traffic, door numbers and points of interest, compared to the one-layer images obtained from satellites," Dabanli added.
Private and public institutions from various sectors such as electricity, natural gas, water, telecommunications, transportation, security, finance, retail sales and healthcare are now using Mabpis’s systems.
"You need a proper map to answer these questions at the very beginning of starting a business to enhance efficiency and productivity," Dabanli said.
"Because if you do not know where the certain things located, you cannot proceed to next steps. The institutions that take services from us are able to save billions of dollars with the help of a successful planning," he added.
