Erdoğan Demirören

Erdoğan Demirören — Biography

Erdoğan Demirören was born on 28 August 1937 in İnegöl, a district of Bursa, and graduated from Saint Benoît French High School; as a young man he played professional football for Emniyet SK and Beşiktaş during the 1956-57 season. When his father Şükrü Demirören died in 1967, he took charge of the family's Sirkeci-based auto parts firm, Oto Kolaylık, and in 1968 founded the Parsat Piston plant, manufacturing under license from Germany's Kolbenschmidt. He moved into the liquefied petroleum gas business in the 1970s, buying Milangaz in 1972 and founding Güneşgaz, Likidgaz and Mutfakgaz in 1975, followed by a Demirören cylinder plant in 1978.

After a long pause in expansion, he picked up the pace again in 1996-97 by founding Dem-Al and Demirören Enerji, then diversified into marble, real estate, port operations, construction and petroleum between 2004 and 2011. The group's first move into media came in 2011 with the purchase of the newspapers Milliyet and Vatan; in 2018 it acquired Doğan Medya Grubu, which included Hürriyet, Posta, Kanal D, CNN Türk and Doğan Haber Ajansı, making Demirören Holding Turkey's largest media company.

Demirören also served on Beşiktaş JK's board of trustees and appeared on Forbes' 2017 list of Turkey's wealthiest people. He died in Istanbul on 8 June 2018 at the age of 80 from respiratory failure and was buried at Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.