Kemal Şahin

Şahin (which means falcon in Turkish) was born in 1955 to a poor family in the village of Taşlıpınar in the Beyşehir district of Konya Province, Turkey.

[2][3] Sahin then went to Germany on a scholarship in 1973, to study metallurgical engineering at RWTH Aachen University[2][3][4] for Etibank, a large state-owned mining company.

After finishing university, he established his own textile-importing company, Santex Moden,[3] in 1982, with a starting capital of 5,000 DM.

[2] Today, he owns 27 production and trading companies, integrated facilities from cotton to cloth, 18 of which are united under Şahinler Holding in Turkey.

[citation needed] The worldwide Şahinler corporation, with a turnover of one billion Euros,[3][4] consists of two companies in Germany and one each in the Netherlands, Austria, France, Switzerland, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, United Kingdom, the U.S., and Turkey.