It’s rare for the owner of a publicly traded company to stand in front of journalists and say its shares cost too much. İbrahim Erdemoğlu did exactly that, telling reporters in a series of interviews that the market valuation of his company, SASA Polyester, had been inflated well beyond reason.
He was right. It didn’t do him any good, though, because when the reckoning came, he was the one who paid for it more than anyone else. In 2023, Erdemoğlu was Turkey’s richest man according to Forbes, with a fortune of $5.3 billion. Today his net worth sits at around $1 billion, and he has slipped to 28th place on the ranking of Turkish billionaires. In three years, more than $4.3 billion — over 80% of his total wealth — has evaporated.
Who is İbrahim Erdemoğlu
The name is barely known outside Turkey, but his rise reads like a case study in Anatolian industrial history. Erdemoğlu founded Merinos Halı, one of the country’s largest carpet manufacturers, and chairs the board of Erdemoğlu Holding.
The leap in scale came in 2015, when he and his brother Ali acquired 51% of SASA Polyester for roughly $102 million. SASA, based in Adana, produces polyester and synthetic fibers — the raw material behind much of Turkey’s textile industry. Over the following years, the two brothers built up their stake to more than 75% of the company’s capital. For a decade, the investment looked like one of the best bets in recent Turkish finance. Then the wind changed.
The role of Turkish inflation
In the years after the pandemic, Turkey went through a currency and inflation crisis with no real parallel elsewhere in Europe, with consumer prices at times rising more than 80% year over year. Under those conditions, holding savings in lira means watching them melt away, and millions of Turkish savers went looking for shelter elsewhere: foreign currency, gold, real estate, and the stock market.
Istanbul’s stock exchange became a mass destination — not so much because investors believed in the fundamentals of the companies listed there, but out of the sheer need to park money in something other than cash. SASA, with its growth story and a low, accessible share price, turned into one of the most heavily traded and best-loved stocks among retail investors. The price climbed well beyond what the company’s actual accounts justified. That’s the point at which the owner himself spoke up to say so. Normally, whoever controls a listed company has every incentive to support the stock’s narrative, not tear it down. Erdemoğlu did the opposite, publicly stating that SASA’s market valuation was artificially inflated. The market ignored the warning for as long as it could, and when the correction finally came, it was brutal.
The numbers behind the crash
SASA shares traded around 10 lira in early 2023. In the session of September 4, 2026, the stock was changing hands at roughly 2.25 lira, down about 19% over the past twelve months and more than 50% below its 52-week high. Market capitalization sits at around 118-123 billion lira, while the company’s debt is estimated at roughly 143 billion lira — more than the entire company is worth on the market.
While the stock was climbing, SASA poured more than $1.5 billion into building new production plants — an ambitious plan made at a time when demand looked solid and capital was cheap in real terms. Then the cycle turned. A global slowdown in the textile industry and margin compression in the chemicals sector reduced the expected returns on those investments, leaving the company with new plants, heavy debt, and revenue growing faster than profitability.
Why his fortune fell more than the stock
When nearly all of a person’s wealth is concentrated in a single company’s stock, their net worth doesn’t just track the share price — it amplifies it. Erdemoğlu also sold off part of his SASA holdings, and those sales compounded the losses on the shares he kept.
There’s also a currency effect to factor in: Forbes rankings are expressed in dollars, while SASA trades in lira. In the years the lira has lost ground against the dollar, a fortune that was even stable in local currency terms shrank once converted. The two dynamics — the falling stock and the falling currency — multiplied each other.
Editor’s note
This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Giacomo Astaldi on September 05, 2026 as «Così l’uomo più ricco della Turchia ha perso l’80% del suo patrimonio in tre anni». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.
