Nevzat Aydin told his employees at Yemeksepeti, an online food delivery company based in Turkey, that he will share $27 million in profits following the company's sale to a German-based firm.
Aydin
told the Hürriyet Daily News on Sunday that he wanted to share the success of the company with the employees after Delivery Hero, a large German online food ordering company, bought Yemeksepeti for $489 million on May 5 of this year.
"We have shared $27 million of the money we earned with our 114 employees," said Aydın. "We did this because if there is a success, we have accomplished it altogether."
The whopping profit-sharing gift resulted in each employee receiving an equivalent of a $200,000 bonus.
"Some employees cried, some screamed, some wrote letters of thanks," Aydin said. "There were emotions, because you affect the lives of the people. People can buy homes, cars. They can immediately do something otherwise they could not with monthly wages of 3,000 to 5,000 Turkish Liras [$1,000-$3,000]. It was a good thing; I wish we could have given them more."
Aydin told the Daily News that he will be part of the management team at Delivery Hero but said he may have established a "bad example" for other managers by sharing the profits with the employees.
"They will hate us, but this is the case," he explained. "Although we did not have any liabilities or promises, we shared $27 million of the money we got from the sale of the company with the employees, out of our own share and by also paying the taxes."
Zoe Henry of Inc. magazine wrote that the Istanbul-based Yemeksepeti had positioned itself well among a young, tech-savvy population in Turkey's capital, which was recently named one of the top five Global Cities of the Future by the magazine.
"Yemeksepeti is the biggest online delivery portal in Turkey," Henry wrote for Inc. "Since launching in 2000, it now clocks 3.7 million active users with 100,000 orders processed each day across Turkey, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates."
Yemeksepeti's new owners said that the bonuses were approved before the sale.
"The success of companies like Delivery Hero and Yemeksepeti is based on amazing company cultures where tremendous people always walk the extra mile," Delivery Hero spokesman Bodo von Braunmuehl said,
according to CNN Money.