BRANCH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

24 MARCH 2021

ANKARA

Honourable District Governor,

Honourable Mayors,

Esteemed Members of the Board of Directors,

Esteemed Presidents and Representatives of the Business and Political World, of NGOs and of our Chambers, Esteemed President and Members of our MÜSİAD Ankara Branch,

Esteemed Members of the Press,

I bid you welcome to the General Assembly of our Ankara Branch and I respectfully greet you all.

Distinguished Guests,

Despite the difficult conditions of the pandemic, I am happy to be able to reach out to Anatolia as far as circumstances allow through our branch general assemblies, and thus both to hold our general assemblies and to have conversations with you about our country’s economic, commercial and political agenda. What did we say? MÜSİAD is a capital platform whose equal is rarely found, the most effective and the most widespread in the field. With this quality it has penetrated our country’s capillary veins in both economic and social terms, and it advances with the strength that comes from commanding even the finest field knowledge.

With only a short time left before I hand over the Presidency, I have been constantly on the move, at every opportunity, for my homeland and for our MÜSİAD — within which I have grown up since its foundation and at every stage of which I have held office — in order to take the pulse of Anatolia, to come together with our members, to be in touch with them and to convey sectoral problems to the relevant authorities by listening to them directly from those concerned. I can say that the number of days I have spent at the İstanbul Head Office is very few beside the time I have spent travelling. I feel both happiness and honour at this. Because MÜSİAD is not a capital group confined to a single region with a narrow sphere of influence. MÜSİAD is the most vivid witness of this country’s social, political and economic history, and indeed one of the elements that built it.

In its new form — renewed after the Presidential System of Government and the first to be structured in the manner most suited to the new world order’s understanding based on speed and project generation — MÜSİAD proves that it is the base of capital, of diplomacy and of industrialization in this country, and that companies of every scale can comfortably exist within the same body in terms of their own demands and outputs. With its broad sectoral range and its companies of every scale, it is a family that embraces the national economy.

Distinguished Guests,

The month of March brought with it very serious transformations for our country: the Economic Reform Package announced under the leadership of our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; the market-regulating laws issued one after another; the fact that the support the state provided to its citizens as an extraordinary measure on account of the pandemic, in line with the principle of the social state, has gradually turned the state itself into a market player; the settling at a certain level of our exchange rates, which were once an internal parameter of ours but have gradually become the most affected by the winds of foreign policy; the tight monetary policy resorted to in order to combat rising inflation rates and the interest rates that rose as a result; the change in the Governorship of the Central Bank and the financial fluctuation experienced afterwards; the action calendar of the Economic Reform Package released as of yesterday; and the AK Party Ordinary Congress which we too attended today.

As you know, for the last few days we have been living through rather turbulent days in the financial markets. We know that this volatility will not be permanent and that the markets will settle into balance at a certain level. At such times, preserving calm, acting coolly and not making wrong transactions out of panic is what the rule requires. Managing financial markets is an art in itself, and the skill of this art lies in managing expectation effects. A well-managed expectation process, both for domestic residents and for foreign investors, will bring this temporary fluctuation to an end.

But while the occasion has arisen, I would like to touch upon another aspect of the matter. The real economy? Or the financial economy? Of course financial instruments should be among the methods we resort to in order to increase the efficiency of our real economic activities. Yet did we not witness with our own eyes how a world system entirely adorned with financial markets became blocked, pandemic or no pandemic? My esteemed friends, the essence of this business is production. Production alone sometimes remains limited. Production plans oriented towards

sales must be adopted. That is, a production and trade plan is needed that suits its market and is scheduled according to the quantity, the product and the capacity of that market. In this way both domestic demand and exports are met without interruption and without one obstructing the other. Let us go one step further: investment models compatible with production and trade planning. That is, ensuring the continuity of investment in the appropriate or strategic sector, in the appropriate company, at the appropriate time and in the appropriate product. I call this production-trade-investment synchronization.

Operating this synchronization is possible only by applying three elements of efficiency without neglecting them and by following them continuously: resource efficiency, capital efficiency and incentive efficiency. In order to realize this synchronization, the existence and the efficient use of resources such as labour, land, energy or natural resources is essential. How should capital be employed in this field? Or is capital going directly into investment or into wealth? Are you transferring what you earn back into your business or into wealth? This must be asked. And finally, are the incentives distributed by the state going to the right place? Is an effective distribution being achieved? Is the incentive going to production and investment, or to the banking system?

This was the reason I asked whether it is real or financial. Phenomena such as inflation, employment, the current account balance and growth fall within the scope of the real economy, and they are likewise resolved and brought into balance through real economic planning and instruments. Operating the three fundamental markets — that is, the capital, raw material and labour markets — in such a way that they feed and consolidate one another ensures that we remain within a sustainable development and that even our growth rates move in a predictable balance, far from volatility.

It is then that the contribution which foreign direct investment, rather than hot money, will make to our country will both develop the elements of national capital and enable Turkish companies to have a much stronger structure in the face of crises.

Because, esteemed friends, if you do not have real economic outputs in your hands, the money in the system is nothing but a burden upon you. Look: the amount of physical money in the world, in the sense of banknotes in circulation, is on average at the level of USD 8 trillion. This money is not held within the banking system. It circulates in the system as cash. Of this amount, USD 1 trillion is in China, 1.7 trillion in the EU area, 1.6 trillion

in the USA, 0.9 trillion in Japan, and the remaining amount (2.4 trillion) in the rest of the world. This money is only the amount of money in our pockets. In the science of economics it is also called M1, that is, the narrow money supply.

Let us come to the broad money supply, that is, to the money that lies in the banking system. %8 of the money in the world is cash. The rest, that is %92, lies in the banking system. In its most up-to-date form this figure is approximately USD 98 trillion. The USD 38 trillion portion of this figure consists of demand deposits or cheques. The remainder circulates in the system to be put to work.

These are the visible face of the iceberg. The real money is the segment we call the financial money supply, and it is at a level of approximately USD 1.5 quadrillion. The 2019 value of derivative contracts alone was USD 550 trillion. The financial money supply consists of things that do not actually exist and that are promissory notes secured against the future, such as funds, derivative assets, digital currencies and contracts through precious metal exchanges.

As you can see, a money supply beyond all imagination is circulating in the system. Now recall what we experienced during the pandemic period. Countries came to the point of stealing medical supplies and even food supplies from one another. That is, the money in the pocket was of no use. As long as there is no production, the money you print is void. As long as you do not produce and do not turn that production into trade, real economic problems cannot be solved with financial instruments.

That the New Economic Reform Package takes production as its basis and gives priority to national industrialization makes us happy, in that it lets us see the results of the insistence we have shown on this matter. Of course, on this issue, under the leadership of our President, we will continue to stand behind the economic administration and our Central Bank, both as the business world and as civil society organizations. With the field data that reaches the nerve endings of the country and that we continuously draw from there, we will continue to keep the state administration informed and to support the production of policies.

Esteemed Friends,

The year 2020 pushed us hard. 2021 will continue with its inventory. A rather difficult economic period is in question not only for us but for the whole world. The process that began with a health crisis turned in time into a global economic crisis as countries’ economic balances deteriorated, and it does not appear possible that this process will end overnight. The global

economic data before the pandemic in fact showed us that a severe global economic crisis was awaiting us. Indeed, we shared a comprehensive report on this with the press. Trade lines had both changed direction and decreased considerably. Commodity prices were entering an upward trend. In a period in which dependence on China was beginning to increase, the Western economies, that is the Developed 20, had entered a contraction trend as of 2016. That is, the pandemic became, in a sense, the place where a bomb whose pin had been pulled fell.

The pandemic, if the expression is permitted, shattered the already fragile global economy. Before the outbreak, the new conditions, the functioning and the new elements of power of the global economy were being debated all over the world. While production shifted to developing countries and to the East, the Western economies were in fact becoming dependent on the Asian economy, both because their ageing populations left them unable to find a generation to which to hand over their companies and because they shifted their production bases to the East in the face of rising production costs. Türkiye, for its part, was a transit country between these two blocs in both supply and logistics. For this reason neither the global powers of the West nor the rising new countries of the East wished to leave Türkiye aside. While production and investment networks shifted to the East, Western global capital was compelled to have a say in the world economy not through production but through the financial markets. For this reason, the downward growth trend that began in 2016 before the pandemic was forcing the Developed 20 to work towards a new economic system and to carry out what is now called the “great reset”. The pandemic became the point that set this process in motion.

In this economic and commercial war, our country was working to guarantee its position and its weight by keeping both commercial and political diplomacy at the highest level. States are not friends or enemies of one another; they are close or distant in line with their interests. In the relations between these two blocs, which at times became tense, Türkiye, with its constant position as mediator, became in a sense one of the balancing elements of the new world order.

MÜSİAD, for its part, holds a wholly distinct place and importance within this system of relations. Non-governmental organizations such as ours, of which there are only a handful of examples in the world and which are spread over a wide area, are like a velvet glove drawn over the iron hand of the state. Through economic diplomacy in the background, by establishing trade and investment networks, they can rebuild strained relations and even repair them. We too, with both our commercial diplomacy network and our reporting system that gives priority to economic intelligence, are carrying commercial neighbourliness beyond borders. Our members’ foreign

trade activity in a sense guarantees the continuity of our country’s new power and position in the world.

It is precisely for this purpose that we restructured our local and global networks and designed the MÜSİAD Trade and Investment Agencies System. On the state side of this system we received the support of the Presidency of Strategy and Budget and of the Investment Office. The aim of this system is to bring the investment or production partnerships our country needs together with foreign demand, and at the same time to bring foreign capital together with its local stakeholders through an end-to-end support mechanism during the process of investing in Türkiye. On this matter the Investment Office and MÜSİAD will share their own member and investor portfolios, and the contribution of the new investments coming to Türkiye to the industrialization movement will be increased. The system we have named MÜSİAD INVEST is the management model of the cash flow in this process.

It is not only these systems: our renewed structure is in fact built, thanks to its project-based functioning, upon bringing the projects of all our branches and representative offices in local and global networks together with the appropriate stakeholder and investor, or upon encouraging possible partnerships and preparing the appropriate legal and bureaucratic ground for them. For our aim is to ensure that all our members, thanks to MÜSİAD’s sphere of influence and its umbrella, increase their capital strength and become the locomotive element of industrialization. This is our essential duty. Because we are a base of capital.

Distinguished Guests,

The pandemic in fact showed us a truth we had never taken into account: when production stopped all over the world and all doors were closed — that is, when everyone, every nation, was left on its own — how was each going to fend for itself? While for years we were producing and trading with globalization and the economic wind it sent out across the world, with the effect of the pandemic globalization suddenly turned into a model whose very existence is questioned. As the new balances of power were being calculated, the Asian economies came to the fore both as a production base and as the new centre of supply and logistics lines.

If you recall, within the rules of globalization the free movement of goods and capital had also made countries somewhat lazy when it came to production and to making use of their own resources. With great ease, multi-

national companies would come to resource-rich countries, carry out production there in favour of their own countries and transfer the profit to their own countries.

In the new world order, in which protectionist policies increasingly come to the fore, unfortunately new threat perceptions have begun to form for us. At the head of these are, of course: the effective use of agricultural land, food self-sufficiency, food security, the food prices that will rise on account of drought and the inflationary pressure this will create all over the world, the formation of national policies on seeds, reducing imports in food to a minimum and entering the category of self-sufficient countries.

Recall what we saw in the early days of the pandemic. The so-called modern Western economy, competing with one another and even crushing one another and stealing goods for medical supplies and food, failed in the global economy game it had itself created. Take note: the new era will be a century in which national economies come to the fore and every country holds tightly to its own resources and to its domestic and national capital. At the head of these resources come, of course, water, agricultural land, seeds, our animals, our mines, our plants that are unique to us and used in medical production, our energy resources, our manpower and, of course, our national companies which, together with national capital, keep us standing in every channel and in every crisis.

My dear brothers and sisters,

I made statements in various channels about the Economic Reform Package announced last week. It contains innovations that please us, both in terms of its main headings and in terms of the boards established to achieve economic coordination and to gather scattered data. Yet the package in fact also shows us the process in which industrialists — that is, we ourselves — must be far more active and productive from this point onwards.

The pandemic reminded us of such concepts that these became the new elements of power by which the future will be shaped: food and agricultural security, renewable energy and energy investments, new lines in logistics, mergers and acquisitions, economic security, insurance and reinsurance, smart cities, infrastructure and superstructure investments abroad, production bases and campuses, pharmaceutical raw material production, technical textiles and many more that I have not been able to list. In particular the strategic importance of derivative energy resources and of mining investments, and the new financial system and

investment instruments that will emerge in this field concerning the green deal, are new agendas we have not encountered before but of which we must become aware and for which we must prepare as soon as possible. These concepts were the names of our committees during the Renewal process. At a time when no one knew these concepts or could give voice to them, we made them a strategic objective and established committees. Perhaps the fact that the same headings now appear in our country’s reform package and have become the new resource and investment management items of the new world is an answer to the criticism we received at that time. Praise be to God, we saw these too before everyone else and applied them before everyone else. The names of our Committees became topic headings not only in the national economic reform package but even in the areas of work before the EU.

My dear brothers and sisters, now I would like to draw your attention to one more point: states have now moved into a position of far greater command over the markets. During the pandemic every state announced support packages, to the extent of its power, in order to protect its citizens. This situation has also gradually led the state to carry the principle of the social state into the economic field. Look, this is not only with us; it is a new trend that has begun all over the world. States will now enter product markets not merely with institutions that perform a regulatory function but themselves as sellers or intermediaries. Indeed they are already entering. We will see in time how this situation will affect us producers under free market conditions. In time we will watch the transformation of unitary state structures into national economies. It is at this point that we must be proactive.

Alongside all of this, the harsh conditions brought by climate change are pushing us towards producing through new policies in 2021 and beyond. The fundamental discourse that the green deal in fact obliges upon us is the effective and efficient use of the basic resources that are becoming ever scarcer, namely water and soil. I say it at every opportunity: of course energy is one of the most important criteria that form the balance of power for the world economy. Yet in the coming period the new balances will be established over a far more vital resource: WATER! The fundamental conflicts that perhaps await us in the future will be the sharing of water resources and water wars.

My Dear Brothers and Sisters,

This process, to which we have gradually become accustomed and which has become almost our new normal, has given us new forms of life and work. But take note: alongside these it has also created new perceptions of threat and of opportunity. In order to see these opportunities and threats, travelling through our provinces one by one and determining their constraints as well as their potential has been an important undertaking for the sake of drawing up each city’s own geo-strategic progress and

economic road map. We have completed this. Now, through our branch general assemblies, I once again feel the satisfaction of being in contact with you in line with this aim of ours. For in the world of the future it is not states but cities that will compete.

As I said at the beginning of my speech, one reason for my visiting the provinces one by one instead of sitting at the centre is to identify promising companies for the execution of industrialization — that is, in order to form appropriate industrial policies and to make them work in the field — and at the same time to examine the potential of these provinces comparatively with their existing companies.

The branding of the provinces and the conversion of their existing assets into value — that is, the proper identification of their potential and the increase of the provinces’ value through investments suited to that potential — is necessary. Every city has its own distinctive values. Turning these into high value-added assets brands that city and increases its contribution to GDP. Comparing our cities according to certain criteria with their counterparts in the world that possess similar characteristics, and applying in our cities as well the methods and processes of the added value produced by those examples in the world, will not only increase our cities’ contribution to national income but will also turn them into self-sufficient elements.

When you look today, cities that stand out with a domestic production and a contribution to GDP that multiplies the national income of many states are able, as brand values, to have even more say in world global production than their own countries. And believe me, this passes through the concept of self-sufficiency. Discovering each city’s distinctive and strategic values, resources and sectors and directing and operating them correctly — this is correct planning.

Distinguished Guests,

The integration into the branches of the Renewal process, which was disrupted with the pandemic, will be swiftly completed in the new administrative term, and committees will be established in accordance with the diversity of the resources and sectoral structures in your city. Thanks to our new project-based structure, the projects of every one of you and of each of our members, whether in the form of their own company or of individual work, will now be operated in direct connection with the head office and, through strong partnerships, will be turned into large projects.

Believe me, every kind of production and investment plan that will reduce our dependence on imports, and the projects suited to them, will be the sole force that carries us to the Türkiye of the future. In this period our industrialists in Türkiye are in a state of very great enthusiasm for investment. Not only large enterprises but also SME structures are quite insistent and eager to grow and to invest. We must turn this situation into an advantage without delay.

As required by my duty at MÜSİAD, I am constantly in the field and I travel through Anatolia. Not only in the metropolitan cities but everywhere in Anatolia, the producer is truly ready to write a new success story provided that it is brought together with a financial structure suited to investment. Yet of course there are certain problems here. In particular, the fact that companies turn towards exports because of the foreign exchange advantage in the domestic market and supply goods to the domestic market more sparingly. What really needs to be done here is to increase production, especially in strategic sectors and above all in raw materials. In the long term, companies must revise their import strategies — that is, they must in fact invest in raw material production.

Look, My Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The OECD Global Economic Outlook Report was announced recently. While the global GDP growth expectation, which is %5.6 for 2021, is %4 for 2022, it was projected that global output would rise above its pre-pandemic level in the middle of 2021. Despite this, it was stated that for many countries growth and incomes at the end of 2022 would remain below their pre-pandemic level.

In the report, which noted that the major risks to the economy continue, it is calculated that faster vaccination in all countries could lead to the faster lifting of restrictions and thus to an increase in confidence and in spending. Otherwise, it is estimated that slow progress in vaccination and the emergence of new virus mutations resistant to existing vaccines would result in company bankruptcies, job losses and weaker growth. As for the forecasts concerning Türkiye’s economy, the growth forecast for this year, which was %2.9 in the December period report, was raised to %5.9. The growth forecast for 2022 was lowered from 3.2 percent to 3 percent.

If you recall, the Turkish economy, which grew at a rate of %5.9 in the last quarter of 2020, was in that period the country recording the highest growth among the G20 countries after China. Over 2020 as a whole, the Turkish economy, which grew at a rate of %1.8, displayed a performance that surprised all the international institutions which had made contraction forecasts for it at the beginning of the year.

Whatever anyone may say, it is clear in the light of the most recently announced growth data that we have displayed a serious performance of resilience. Yet for this growth performance to acquire a sustainable quality, a long and difficult road lies ahead of us.

Our faith in our country and in our country’s potential is complete, esteemed friends. Whatever was said to be impossible, we did it during the pandemic — praise be to God.

In 2020, a year that passed with economic difficulty, we held one of Türkiye’s most important fairs.

We held with broad participation MÜSİAD EXPO 2020, the largest fair held after the pandemic, which drew intense interest from exhibitors and visitors alike, and we completed it successfully. Nearly 15,000 visitors from 102 countries, led by the countries of Europe, Asia-Pacific, Eurasia, Africa and MENA, attended the four-day fair. At the fair, which we held under the slogan “Global Trade is Here”, we hosted 400 purchasing delegations from 50 countries. EXPO 2020, which we held at the İstanbul TÜYAP Fair and Congress Centre and which was attended by business people, politicians and academics from every region of the world, enabled our business people to open up to new forms of cooperation while also allowing foreign investors to examine investment opportunities in our country at close hand.

Distinguished Guests,

We support our fellow travellers with 89 points in Türkiye and 225 contact points in 95 countries around the world. And now we are launching a brand-new restructuring movement in order to unite them within a strong trade and investment network.

We, together with each of our members, have brought to this point this valuable structure, which works harder every day in order to be of benefit to the Turkish economy and to the nation with the employment of 2 million people that it provides.

We do this with our institutional culture, our accumulated knowledge and the strength we draw from our organization. By processing the information we obtain through you from domestic and international regions, we are building an important database. As a result of this, we present to the business world a picture that sets out all the risks, the opportunities and the current problems.

As you know, we launched our Renewal process in order to prepare in advance for the new world system. Our motto at the outset was “Together”.

We have fulfilled almost all the initiatives we planned and promised within the framework of our Renewal process. Now, with our large-scale projects, we are gathering the fruits of this process.

As MÜSİAD, we are developing projects aimed at increasing the contribution made to the national economy and at improving the culture of partnership among our members.

You will see how the line drawn in 2018 designed a road extending all the way to 2023-2030. As I mentioned above, we set out this vision years ago, before anyone else saw it. The committees we planned and established years ago are counted as items in the economic strategies not of today but of tomorrow.

For example, we said a committee on smart cities and city economies; after us it became a policy at the Presidential level and was written into the 11th Development Plan. Indeed, the projects launched across the EU for the twinning of cities showed how right and how far-sighted we were on this matter. When we used the word gastro-economy, in our country it was still being carried out as limited work in the hands of a very rare and restricted group. Today it has become, almost everywhere, the basic starting point of tourism and of the country’s development. Likewise we said new resources and investments in tourism, and tourism moved beyond mere summer tourism and turned towards completely different fields. We established our rural development committee, and there, with the Smart Rural Towns Project of which I will speak in much greater detail shortly, we supported the annual planning of our Ministry. Mergers and acquisitions, Export Matching…

For this purpose, our 23 committees in total under the roof of the MÜSİAD ASSEMBLY, which we established during the Renewal process, have begun to gather the potential investors and industrialists in Anatolia around specific projects, with projects suited to their own thematic or sectoral fields.

These projects have begun to encourage the capital strength in Anatolia to invest in projects or to become a partner in them.

For example, with our Investment and Production Bases Project, we created a model that builds living and production zones in which all the needs of our small-scale companies — which struggle to produce in narrow areas and therefore cannot reach economies of scale — are met in the same environment, and that will in time turn them into institutionalized companies ready to move into organized industrial zones. We have completed the first prototype of this model, and we will soon begin the construction of the second as well.. In order to enter among the world’s top ten economies, and for the epidemics and disasters that may recur under any circumstances, we must establish production bases. By establishing production bases, it becomes possible to protect companies, employees and production in situations of epidemic or severe disaster and to continue without a full shutdown.

We have named this model, in short, SME INCUBATION CENTRES. This model, in which all the needs of SMEs — from education to accommodation, from social activities to artistic settings — are met within the same living space, aims to create a safe production and living area both for our workers and for our producers and their families.

This project of ours too became one of our works planned at the centre and transferred towards Anatolia. At the same time, this project of ours was registered as a project under state protection by the Presidency of Strategy and Budget (SBB) within the scope of the Coordination Council for the Improvement of the Investment Environment (YOİKK).

Likewise, with our Smart Agricultural Cities Project, we launched an initiative in order to encourage rural development and in this way to support reverse migration and to attain a homogeneous population structure. We presented this as a model to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

With the Smart Agricultural Cities Model, we developed an initiative to encourage rural life and to support rural development, with opportunities targeting the population crowded into the large cities and especially the enterprises of women and young people.

Today many of our members in Anatolia are carrying out preparatory work in order to implement this initiative in their own regions.

Many more projects like these were produced by our committees and spread to the grassroots. Branding cities in the field of gastro-tourism through gastro-economy and Turkish Culinary Arts; establishing structures such as Caravan Tourism and Field Hospitals through multiple partnerships; creating a secure purchasing platform in the second-hand vehicle market; creating a secure real estate buying and selling platform; growing selected

SMEs at 23 locations in 20 places in line with the 2023 targets and turning them into Türkiye and World Brands. This and many projects like it became the fruits of MÜSİAD’s Renewal adventure.

We created a MÜSİAD Brand in 6 basic fields in line with Türkiye’s 6 basic strategies: MÜSİAD INNOVA ( MÜSİAD YENİLİK) for the sake of innovation management and adaptation to the conditions of digital transformation.

In order to develop the strategic sectors and business models of the future, MÜSİAD FUTURE (MÜSİAD GELECEK),

In order to turn education into a MÜSİAD school and to give it a corporate identity, MÜSİAD ACADEMY.

2023 YER-EL (20 YER 23 EL), which covers the work directed at our Anatolian companies for the sake of branding, of bringing out World Brands from Türkiye by increasing companies’ brand values and of turning our SMEs into large-scale corporate brands; and MÜSİAD INVEST (MÜSİAD YATIRIM), in order to turn the reliability advantage of the MÜSİAD Brand in Türkiye’s investment strategies, its field presence and savings kept under the mattress into mass investments and partnerships and to establish a systematic structure of investment funds,

MÜSİAD TIA (MÜSİAD TİCARET ve YATIRIM AJANSLARI), which we designed together with the Presidency’s Investment Office in order to promote Türkiye as an investment and trade market for direct foreign investors and to operate MÜSİAD’s international field presence like a trade and investment system. As many of you have witnessed, we are continuing our work without interruption and we will continue to do so. We will carry on developing projects and serving our country, our nation and the lands in which we were born.

As MÜSİAD, while we uphold the ideals of our founders and these targets of ours, we also carry on the MÜSİAD tradition, on the other hand.

Our Qard al-Hasan Fund, one of the finest applications of this tradition, becomes a balm for wounds through the goodwill of our members and enables us to strengthen the culture of brotherhood and to pass it on to new generations.

Our Qard al-Hasan Fund project, which we brought to life out of the wish to carry on an ancient tradition and which we created with the thought of facilitating the trade of our merchants by transforming the culture of mutual aid and solidarity among our members into an institutional structure, has institutionalized the culture of mutual aid and solidarity.

On the other hand, we also continue the practice of the “Zimem Ledger”, another of our ancient traditions, with the support and the contributions of all our branch members, above all the head office.

Esteemed Friends,

MÜSİAD is a family, a home, a school. Here we all walk with the pride of being soldiers of the same consciousness and the same cause, and when the time comes we hand the flag over to our brothers who come after us. This rule is ancient for everyone. This is what makes MÜSİAD distinctive. For this purpose, being present at the General Assembly of our branch makes me exceedingly happy. As I complete my words here, I hope that the MÜSİAD Ankara General Assembly will bring blessings and that our branch’s contributions to our business world will continue to increase.

I wish success to our branch president, to the board of directors, to the MÜSİAD Women Committee and to our brothers of Young MÜSİAD. I thank our MÜSİAD Local High Board President Mr. Ahmet and our local relations committee, as well as our production and trade high board president Mr. Oktay, our professional staff and everyone who has contributed.

I greet you all with respect and affection.

Abdurrahman Kaan

President of MÜSİAD