The second of the Independent Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (MÜSİAD) Annual Evaluation Meetings, T.R. Minister of Commerce Prof. Dr. It was held at MÜSİAD Headquarters with the participation of Ömer Bolat.

MÜSİAD held the second meeting of the first month of each year with the relevant Ministers at MÜSİAD Headquarters, with the Minister of Trade Prof. Dr. It was carried out with Ömer Bolat and his team consisting of Deputy Ministers. At the meeting attended by Deputy Ministers of Trade Özgür Volkan Ağar and Mahmut Gürcan, problems related to commercial life were discussed and consultations were held with common sense.

The program, which started with the opening speeches of MÜSİAD President Mahmut Asmalı, continued with the presentations and statements of Minister Bolat. Then, the question-answer session and general consultation section took place under the chairmanship of Minister Bolat, Deputy Ministers Özgür Volkan Ağar, Mahmut Gürcan and MÜSİAD President Mahmut Asmalı.

“As MÜSİAD, we are ready to take responsibility”

MÜSİAD President Mahmut Asmalı, at the beginning of his speech in the program, mentioned the massacre in Gaza and said that he cursed Israel once again. Stating that the situation in Gaza should never be forgotten and that it should always be brought to the agenda, Asmalı said, “We will not let it fall off the agenda. "We will continue to explain the Palestine and Gaza issue on every platform, stand together with our oppressed Palestinian brothers and run campaigns," he said.

Talking about MÜSİAD's contributions to domestic and foreign trade from past to present, Asmalı emphasized that they will always try to do better and said, "We express that we are ready, as always, to take responsibility for the Turkish Century to have a start worthy of its name."

Asmalı continued his words as follows:

“We, as businessmen and traders, are enthusiastic and passionate about taking our country to higher levels economically as well as making halal earnings. Therefore, our duty is to work for the development of our country; to produce more, invest and thus provide employment.

Thank God, as MÜSİAD, we have accomplished many good works so far in terms of providing employment and increasing investment. "Our work will continue to increase in 2024 and beyond, God willing."

“Turkish economy continues to grow”

In his speech at the program, President Asmalı also shared the figures of the year-end survey traditionally conducted with MÜSİAD members. Emphasizing that the members' trade volumes, profit rates and the answers to the survey consisting of 24 different questions are equivalent to the Turkish economy data, Asmalı continued his words as follows:

"Despite these earthquakes, which were described as the "disaster of the century", the Turkish economy showed great resilience by growing by 4% in the first quarter of the year, and continued this performance in the second quarter of the year and achieved a positive differentiation within the global economy by growing by 3.9%. Finally, the Turkish economy, which grew by 5.9% in the third quarter of the year, managed to become the 2nd fastest growing country in the G20 after India in this period, thus achieving a significant success by recording growth for 13 consecutive quarters. In such a period when our country, along with the leading economies, is facing the inflation problem and is in the process of monetary tightening, the increase in the growth rate of the Turkish economy is a development that should be appreciated.
The first question we asked our members was how their domestic sales changed in 2023 compared to the previous year. While 42.4% of our members who participated in our survey answered this question as "Increased", the rate of those who answered "Decreased" is 39.7%.

“Our target for 2024 is 375 billion dollars”

Emphasizing Turkey's change between 1980 and 2023, Minister of Commerce Ömer Bolat said, "In 1980, we were a country with a national income of 67.5 billion dollars, 262 thousand registered companies, only 1000 exporters and a total export of 2.9 billion dollars. "Later, in 2023, we managed to become a country with a national income of 1.1 trillion dollars, a national income per capita of 12,521 dollars, 140 thousand exporters and 255.8 billion dollars of exports, 2 million 346 thousand companies, and 2 million 224 thousand tradesmen," he said.

Minister Bolat continued his speech as follows:

“As our President announced last week, Turkey's total goods exports in 2023 will be 255.8 billion dollars, and this is recorded as a record in the history of the Republic. In addition, we aim for our exports of goods and services to be 375 billion dollars in total for 2024. While our defense industry exports were only 248 million dollars in 2002, it reached 5.5 billion dollars by 2023, an increase of 21 times. During this period, the number of our companies increased 40 times from 56 to over 2 thousand. Even just looking at these headlines, we understand that the face of Türkiye has changed. From now on, with the support of you, our valued business people and friends, we will continue to run towards the goals we have set for the country to survive.

As the Ministry of Commerce, we continue to provide our business world with all the support they need. To our exporters at all levels, starting from our SMEs; We provide support at every stage and step of export, from preparation for export to marketing, from creating international distribution channels to becoming a global brand.

In this context, we provided 11.7 billion lira support to our companies in 2023 for goods exports. We will increase this number even more in 2024, approximately doubling it. In terms of service exports, we have provided a total of 2.5 billion liras of support to our companies this year, especially in the IT, technical consultancy, TV series - movies, health, logistics and education sectors, and over 5 billion liras since 2012. In 2024, we allocated a resource of 5.1 billion TL to our service exporting companies.

In order to expand and support our exporter companies' access to finance, Türk EXİMBANK and İGE A.Ş. By working intensively with , we facilitate our exporters' access to both loans and guarantees for loans. In addition to these steps, as a result of the joint work carried out by our Ministry with our Central Bank, we increased the daily limit of rediscount loans by 10 times to 3 billion TL. Again in this context, we gave our exporters the opportunity to use rediscount loans under the policy interest rate. No matter how much the geopolitical risks in our region have increased, our sole aim is to protect and further develop our country's economic and commercial gains.”

After the opening speeches, the program continued with the consultation meeting of MÜSİAD members with Minister Bolat, Deputy Ministers and MÜSİAD President Mahmut Asmalı. Common sense was emphasized at the meeting, where questions related to sectoral and export problems in commercial life were asked.