7th UGİK International Young Businessmen Congress
8 APRIL 2021
MÜSİAD HEAD OFFICE
Honourable Minister,
Honourable Deputy Minister,
Esteemed MÜSİAD Members and Friends,
President of Young MÜSİAD and our Brothers and Sisters the Members of Young MÜSİAD
Esteemed Presidents and Representatives of the Business World and of the NGOs,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
At the International Young Businessmen Congress, which our Young MÜSİAD is organizing for the 7th time, I respectfully greet you all; welcome.
Distinguished Guests,
We entrusted our YOUNG MÜSİAD Committee, which we see as the future of MÜSİAD and which, for this reason, we endowed with a far more original and autonomous structure by changing its structural and operating model especially within the scope of our renewal process, to our Local High Board, and thereby ensured that they became the element of the future of our field presence both at home and abroad. In a sense, we first realized through renewal the practical opening of the UGİK gathering, whose theme is “Noticing the future today”, that takes as its basis the young and the renewal to be built upon the young. We noticed the future today.
The stronger the quality richness of a society's population is, as much as its ratio of young population, the faster and more sustainable that society's processes of determining the strategies of the future and of adaptation will be. Today's world, and especially the Western world, is ageing in terms of population and, in addition, is experiencing a considerable decrease in its rate of population growth over the last 10 years. It even has difficulty finding a subsequent generation to which to hand over even its companies with high brand value. As for us, although the situation is not this dire, the decline in our fertility rates should lead us to think. However, merely having a young population does not mean being a key country on the geopolitical atlas of the future. Young people are of course the codes of the future to which a country's past inventory will be transferred. But there are certain conditions for these codes to become productive interfaces that will make development continuous. We need not only technical development but a generation that will hand this development on: a generation that is qualified, aware of the requirements of its age, that has passed through a multifaceted and multidisciplinary education, that is at home with the cultures of the world's other civilizations, that can strategically use the trump card of knowing languages and history in order to achieve cultural penetration, that can read the past and make strategic plans by combining the codes of the past with the needs of the future, and that has embraced the Akhi culture. At the very least, this is what the profile of a young person who can notice the future today means for us.
Distinguished Guests,
The pandemic was a moment of rupture. In a process in which the squeezed world economy and the geopolitical balances of power went in search of allies through commercial openings, in which we began to hear the footsteps of a new economic cold war and observed its reflections in the rapidly declining production and rising commodity prices since 2016, and in which economic productivity was shifting towards the East, the Pandemic fell upon our classical models of production, consumption, sharing, work and life like a bomb with its pin pulled. Although the economic crisis that began with the epidemic closed national economies in upon themselves within a state-supported structure, digital development moved in exactly the opposite direction. Because the way we come together and do business together encountered a barrier of contact. And this presented us with new models of doing business.
The pandemic dictated to us new models of production, consumption and living as much as it taught us to be economically self-sufficient. Although at first we had difficulty adapting to these conditions, today they have gradually become part of the routine flow of life. The remote working system has begun to settle almost completely in the West. Seeing the fall in fixed costs at the workplace and that remote personnel can fulfil their responsibilities under their employment contracts from outside the company within a defined framework of rules, the business world brought a legal framework to this model as well and approved the system not as an alternative but as a model. Indeed, after a period in which it was debated whether offices are necessary at all, a second business model was presented to us in which shared offices are to be used for essential requirements and all other work is to be done in the online environment through mutual interaction. It is clear that white-collar employment in particular will be handled in working life in this way even if the Pandemic ends.
Our education models have begun to change. Although this has not yet settled sufficiently in some societies, including ours, we believe that distance education acquiring continuity and continuing as a permanent alternative alongside formal education is a good opportunity for the assessment of this process. For our young people and our children who cannot find the opportunity of formal education because of short- or long-term difficulties, illness or other compulsory circumstances, it should be regarded as a dual-alternative system so that they can connect to lessons online immediately and not fall behind, and infrastructures should be developed accordingly.
For however much the world of the future promises technical development, it also awaits us with just as many new threats: possible new epidemics, climate change and the production difficulties that will emerge as its result, new-generation laboratory-produced diseases extending as far as biological armament. If we want to notice today the future that awaits us against all of these, we need bases where production and supply chains will continue without interruption, structures that give priority to nature and to the human being, the efficient management of our natural resources, water above all, and the placing of energy resources on a footing supported by renewable energy investments. For this reason we must establish production and trade bases that are self-sufficient from energy to investment capital, without cutting or disrupting production and by making production a part of human nature. As MÜSİAD, we have developed a model, taken under state protection by the SBB and which we call production and trade bases, that prepares SMEs and start-ups for the future, that will keep production and supply chains going without interruption in every kind of epidemic and disaster, that teaches the current of industrialization towards sectoral specialization to students with the advantage of on-site education through the educational institutions within it, and that in this way prepares young people for the business models of the future. Tomorrow we will hold the press launch of the second one as well. This project, which notices the future today and is among the fruits of our renewal process, was brought to life by our Industrial Zones and Campuses Committee.
We are obliged to bring to life today the smart agriculture strategies that will raise us to the status of a country self-sufficient in agriculture. Our smart agricultural cities project, which we have presented as a business model as MÜSİAD and which will be developed much further and put into practice in the new administration term, essentially aims to bring back to agriculture, through reverse migration, the human population that is crowded into certain regions and whose quality of life therefore declines, to turn agricultural land into productive production bases, and to bring food security under control in the long term by making production plans on the axis of suitable soil, suitable product and domestic production-foreign demand. Setting out with the slogan of city comfort in the countryside, this model also opens the way to rural urbanization. This in turn provides an important input in creating city brands. This project, which notices the future today, was brought to life by the Rural Development Committee, one of our renewal committees. This project has been planned entirely with you, our esteemed young people, in mind. In order to be able to notice the future today, basic needs and especially the efficient use of resources must not be ignored. Today we know that in derivative markets agricultural production outputs are traded with far higher purchases and returns than precious metal commodities. Agricultural commodities sold on derivatives will mean that in the future even what grows in our soil will not belong to us. Esteemed Guests,
With the TARS Venture Capital Fund that we support as MÜSİAD, we aimed at an alternative fund and investment model that continuously grows its capital and develops competitive business models in the effective use of innovative technologies that value the human being and are the product of collective wisdom, so that the agriculture and food ecosystem may be a pioneer in the world. Thus we led the formation of a common platform for companies with the potential to lead and to be pioneers in global competition to provide wisdom, capital and labour so that they may create added value. This initiative, which offers investment areas across a broad spectrum from agricultural biotechnology to farm management, from mechanization to innovative food, was realized by our Smart Cities and City Economies Committee. And we supported it.
Look, in the world of the future the language of investment, its method, its diplomacy, its definition and its jargon are all changing. State participations or organizations that formerly came into play only for direct foreign investment fall short today. The investor now listens neither to the leader, nor to the state institution, nor to written documents. The investor looks at the money; seeing every country in which it will appreciate as an investment area, just as one forms a portfolio of securities, the investor distributes investments across different countries and forms a direct investment portfolio that has bought the risk. States are close to or distant from one another only in line with their interests; concepts such as friendship and enmity are meaningless in the literature of international relations. Trade and investment are now the new criterion of alliance among states.
However, in the field there are no longer organizations established by the hand of the state, but independent NGOs or capital organizations, and these are the velvet gloves slipped onto the iron hand of the state.
We, as capital structures like MÜSİAD above all, whose field breadth and depth have reached indisputably enormous dimensions, are the new actors determining the direction of investment. We must now form investment strategies revolving around two new concepts: Investor Trader, investment trading. The investor trader and investment trade.
States now establish not only production but also capital bases and, whether through salaried personnel, transfer the data of the investor potential in other countries to their own countries, develop strategies suited to them and present investment packages to them before they have even found the country.
Another method is what we call cross investment: bringing together the resources of one country with the financiers of another and channelling the output or the next leg of the investment towards the main country. That is, Türkiye, which wants to determine the investment strategy of the future, can not only attract investment to its own country but at the same time, by matching country data, bring the financier and the resource together and also trade in this business. This agency system is not a structure that can be controlled by the hand of the state; here volunteer attachés and capital organizations will come into play.
Apart from this, Türkiye can carry out its industrialization policy on its own soil by shifting its basic production to countries rich in land and resources such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Egypt, North Africa, Central Africa and even Syria. It can thus make more productive use of high-added-value products and high-technology production industry for its future.
Just as there is the concept of an exclusive economic zone, it is not far off that countries neighbouring one another by land or by sea will build investment zones and investment islands and will regulate their legal infrastructures for the sharing of the production outputs of these.
Here the word island should of course not be taken as a geographical term. Investment islands will be regions where the cross-investment networks of many countries meet, which will acquire the status of a free investment zone like a free trade zone, and where the shares and conditions of use of states will be regulated in international law.
Otherwise, the one-sided economic vice that China applies today in Central Africa or that France still and insistently applies in North Africa and in Libya will one day cause the ever-increasing economic cold war between countries to explode at far heavier cost. As in typical Nash rules, a place over which everyone wants to establish domination /in the end cannot produce sufficiently productive outputs for anyone. For this reason the investment world of the future will unite on common investment islands. Ultimately, with its growing population and its young population potential in an ageing world, Africa has entered everyone's range as an enormous Market.
As MÜSİAD, with the MÜSİAD Trade and Investment Agencies system that we have named M-TIA, whose first talks we have held with the Investment Office of the Republic of Türkiye and which, God willing, we will put into practice in the new term with the pilot branches we have selected abroad, we have designed investment trade as well as the matching and pooling activities necessary for investment in a way compatible with new-generation investment models.
We do not perceive investment as inflows of hot money and the temporary stationing of foreign investors only in certain regions. Every project developed is now an instrument of investment and funding in the world of the future. Even projects based on real estate are securitized and turn into instruments of investment. Indeed, these securitized values may take the form of collateral for a national crypto currency. The idea of establishing the Project exchange, which we have been touching upon for years, is in fact that the abundance of cash in the world should not be evaluated only in financial markets as gain over money, but should be turned towards projects. As long as investment trade is carried out, every activity that is the subject of investment is apportioned as a security in both spot and derivative transactions as a project. The monetary mechanism of the future will operate in this way. How many more years it will take for cash to come to an end is unknown. But a society accustomed to making payments through digital transactions and to revising the legal infrastructures of these payments will hereafter use, in place of money, the valuation processes of all assets and their dates of use for its own investment or trade transactions. That is, our investments will in fact become the method of payment of our trade.
Esteemed Guests,Esteemed Young People,
Thank God, we have come to the point of producing our own car. Now the transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, in compliance with the Green Deal as well, is taking place quite rapidly. Despite its constantly fluctuating structure, the automotive sector is in no way among the sectors that will disappear. However, the decline seen in vehicle ownership all over the world, both because of the traffic problem and because of rising energy costs, also means that our mobility habits will be questioned in the coming period. The effect of less travel, less interaction and new models of doing business points to a world in which far less time will be spent on transport over time. Moreover, digitalization has not only changed the pattern of demand in certain sectors. It has also been reflected in the consumer's expectations from the vehicle in vehicle ownership. Consumers now demand automobiles designed so that they can travel without focusing too much on driving, indeed in the comfort of their home and while controlling their home and their work.
The mobility ecosystem, in parallel with the development of smart cities and city technologies, has also brought the sharing system model onto the agenda. Automobiles now belong not to an individual but to a neighbourhood, a street or a housing estate in that city, and at certain hours people are monitored through a smart network so that they can meet their needs with these vehicles.
China is a country where serious investments are being made both in adding automobiles to the smart city application and in the production of electric smart vehicles. While China is setting aside USD 130 billion for this field for the next 10 years, it is estimated that classic car manufacturers will change their production lines and turn to an investment of around USD 300 billion for new-type models. Türkiye must not fall behind this trend. Nor will it.
Distinguished Guests,
As I conclude my words I will return once more to the beginning. Yes, we have touched on some matters that may arise in the world of the future. So who will manage these changes? Strategist CEOs. That is, we need young people who will be both the strategy-setting adviser of their company and aware of all production or working processes, who possess the duties and responsibilities and the work of every department, who maintain oversight continuously, who can immediately adapt their institution to changes in the outside world, who can take the initiative on behalf of their institution in connections with external stakeholders, who have passed through a multidisciplinary education, who will closely follow technical and technological changes alongside every kind of managerial process from legal procedures to financial statements and who will know the systematics of how these work and operate; in short, who will be a fully equipped chief of management.
These managers must at the same time possess skills in language, eloquence, persuasion techniques, meeting and stress management, and the workings of the state and bureaucracy; in short, we need young and vigorous minds that give priority to the human being, that are close to their employees, that empathize and that leave no work for the boss. There are studies on the Strategist CEO and they are continuing. For as long as there are no leaders to manage the future, the dreams built in the world of the future will remain suspended.
Do not forget, young friends: under your theme of noticing tomorrow today, a far sharper system of competition awaits you tomorrow. Moreover, in a world where a great many jobs are handled and even managed by smart systems, protecting your own field will not be as easy as it is today. This time those you compete with will not only be your human rivals but the very smart systems and software you yourselves produce. For this reason, review yourselves and your equipment from today onwards in order to notice the future.
Distinguished Guests,
I offer my thanks to everyone who contributed to the realization of this valuable organization, foremost to Mr. Ahmet Şekerli, the President of our Local High Board to which our Young MÜSİAD Committee is attached, to our Young MÜSİAD President Yunus Furkan Akbal, to our professional staff and to everyone, and I greet you with respect and affection. foremost among them, I thank everyone who contributed to this important organization and greet you with respect and affection.
Abdurrahman KAAN
President of MÜSİAD