Machinery industry boosted Turkey's economy

While the main topics of the meeting were digitalization, green consensus, sustainability, artificial intelligence, twin transformation and automation, issues such as the state of the sector in the world, maintaining and improving its competitiveness were also discussed.

The third largest manufacturing industry is machinery

MIB President Emre Gencer informed about the Turkish machinery industry and noted that the machinery industry is the third largest manufacturing industry in terms of market size with a strength of 255 thousand people.

Turkey's economy, which has expanded by an annual average of 6.3 % in the last three years, has reached the top among OECD countries.

Machinery investments contributed with an annual average growth rate of 18 percent. Emphasizing the contribution of exports to growth, Gencer said, "Turkey's machinery exports grew by an average of 10 percent annually during this period, reaching 25.5 billion dollars in 2022. Our imports increased at a similar rate during this period, reaching 35 billion dollars last year. More than 50 percent of our machinery exports go to the EU. In the machine tools and other related manufacturing technologies sector, exports amounted to 1.2 billion dollars in 2022."

" The Customs Union regulations should be modernized"

Stating that they realize more than half of their foreign trade volume with EU countries, but there are negative aspects of these market conditions, Gencer stated the following:

"As the Turkish machinery industry, we have started to feel the negative effects of the economic slowdown in EU countries since the end of this year. More importantly, the contractual shortcomings of the current Customs Union regulations are creating more and more difficulties for our bilateral trade. We therefore reiterate at every opportunity the need to modernize the existing Customs Union arrangements. Another critical issue is Turkey's alignment with the acquis in key policy areas such as the European Green Deal and the digital single market agenda.