Bimeks

» see bimeks.com.tr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Bimeks started as one shop in Kadıköy run by two brothers, Mehmet Murat Akgiray and Ahmet Vedat Akgiray. The English Wikipedia entry puts the founding at 1990 and the Turkish trade press keeps writing 1989, which is the usual gap between when a shop opens and when a company gets registered. What both agree on is what it was: the first technology retailer in Turkey, from the era when buying a computer meant a small shop with a printed price list and a man who knew what a motherboard was.

It grew for twenty five years. By December 2016 there were 135 stores across 60 cities, and in April 2011 it had become the first technology retail company to trade on Borsa İstanbul, with turnover reaching 396 million lira that year. bimeks.com.tr was running long before that: the Internet Archive has captures of it from April 1997, when it was mostly a Borland reseller page with a Delphi logo on it.

Then the direction reversed, and it reversed the way retail chains always do. Stores closed one at a time rather than all at once, so for two or three years the company was still a going concern with a shrinking footprint and no announcement to make about it. The staff went in batches. By 2018 the financial press had stopped asking whether Bimeks would recover.

~ the case file ~

~ the store years ~

Turkish tech retail in the 2000s ran on a split that anyone who built their own machine here will recognize. The chain store was where you went to put your hands on the part, and donanimhaber was where you found out what it should cost and who was actually selling it for that. Bimeks was on the wrong side of that split for most of its life and kept signing leases through it.

The chain formats that survived in Turkey either sold white goods alongside the electronics or belonged to a group that could carry them. Bimeks was pure technology retail with a listed share price and 135 leases, which is a very exposed shape to hold when your customers are checking your shelf price against a marketplace listing on the phone in their hand.

~ the slow close ~

The website went before the company did, and it went in a way I have not seen on any other grave here. On 12 March 2019 Bimeks was formally delisted from Borsa İstanbul. That same month bimeks.com.tr stopped serving a store and started serving a page from nic.tr, the Turkish domain registry, headed "alan adı duraklatılmış" and explaining that the name had been suspended for financial or administrative reasons. The last thing a listed retail chain with 135 stores behind it ever put on its own address was a registry notice telling the owner to log in and check their payments.

The court case took two more years. Istanbul Anadolu 3rd Commercial Court, file 2019/469, ruled the company bankrupt on 17 February 2021 at 15:36, naming Bimeks Bilgi İşlem ve Dış Ticaret A.Ş. of Ataşehir. The public announcement went out on 12 April. Nobody was waiting for it by then, which is what a slow bankruptcy does: it uses up all the attention long before the ruling arrives.

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