Demir Sabanci earned his Johnson MBA in 1999. He is married to fellow Johnson graduate, Aslihan Koruyan, MBA ’00.
Mr. Sabanci is the founder, president, and chairman of Sedes Holding, A.S., which has investments in many sectors, including electronics retailing, aviation, logistics, plastic packaging, insurance, real estate development, and personal care and cosmetic retailing. He is also chairman and president of Sedesco, Inc., a New York-based real estate development company that he founded in 2009.
He is an active volunteer leader for Johnson, currently serving on the Johnson Advisory Council. He served previously on the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Leadership Council. He has also spoken at Johnson’s Emerging Markets Institute annual conference. Mr. Sabanci has been extremely generous to Johnson philanthropically. In 2014, he made a gift to establish and endow the Demir Sabanci Professorship of Marketing and Management at Johnson, which supports a Johnson faculty member located at Cornell Tech. He also made a gift in 2019 to create and name the Sabanci Bridge, an integrated, immersive learning platform that links a classroom in the Breazzano Family Center for Business Education in Ithaca with a classroom in the Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech. The Sabanci Bridge is named in honor of Demir’s late father, Özdemir Sabanci.