BRANCH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

29 MARCH 2021

DÜZCE

Honourable District Governor,

Honourable Mayors,

Esteemed Members of our Board of Directors,

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

Esteemed Members of the Press,

I respectfully greet you all at the General Assembly of our branch; welcome, you have honoured us with your presence.

Distinguished Guests,

A difficult year, 2020, cast us into 2021 together with the hardships it handed down and with new perceptions of threat and opportunity. As the global economy entered a great shock on both the supply and the demand side with the Covid-19 pandemic, the mobility of capital, goods and people came almost to a standstill, and in many sectors survival became impossible.

The COVID 19 process is not one that will end overnight. Experts state that even if vaccination efforts are entirely completed, herd immunity will take time. In other words, we still have just as long a road ahead of us. While all this is happening, a new way of life is in fact quietly entering our lives, and we are calmly adapting to these new rules.

Of course there is a social fatigue, but at the same time we can say that our reaction mechanisms have settled down. After all, the brain provides adaptation and habituation to every state of mind after a while. Therefore many rules that we found strange last year have become normalized today. A year from now they will have become habit.

Moreover, even if the COVID process ends completely, two more great problems await us: climate change and biological terrorism or armament. Therefore, in this process every country is obliged to make its own contingency plans. In every field, from production to security, the measures against a possible recurrence

will be taken. In order to reflect this advantage onto the field with all its parameters, we must prepare the manufacturing industry very well for the medium- and long-term transformation process brought about by Covid-19. For there lies before us an area of opportunity in which, by using it to develop our R&D and innovation capacity and our workforce competencies, we can make a serious leap in the global economy in the long term.

We believe in particular that we have a serious advantage in terms of geographical location, and that this will create a great area of opportunity for our country in the future projections of the global economy. At a time when supply chains are being redesigned and logistics lines redrawn, Türkiye, the country where the roads intersect, must take its place in the game as a far more active player.

MÜSİAD, for its part, holds a wholly distinct place and importance within this systematics of relations. Non-governmental organizations such as ours, which are spread over a wide area and of which there are but a handful of examples in the World, are like a velvet glove drawn over the iron hand of the state. In the background they can rebuild and even repair strained relations by establishing trade and investment networks through the channel of economic diplomacy. We too, with both our commercial diplomacy network and our reporting system that gives priority to economic intelligence, are carrying commercial neighbourhoods beyond borders. The foreign trade mobility of our members in a sense guarantees the continuity of our country's new power and position in the world.

What did we say? MÜSİAD is the most effective and most widespread capital platform in the field, one whose like is rarely encountered. With this quality it has penetrated into our country's capillaries 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 my Presidency, I have been constantly on the move, on every occasion, for both my homeland and our MÜSİAD — within which I have been raised since its foundation and in every stage of which I have served — 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

in this. Because MÜSİAD is not a capital group confined to a single region with a narrow sphere of influence. MÜSİAD is the most living 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 structured in the manner most suited to the new world order's understanding based on speed and project generation — MÜSİAD proves that it is this country's base of capital, of diplomacy and of industrialization, and that companies of every scale can comfortably exist within the same body for the sake of their own demands and outputs. With its broad sectoral spectrum and its firms of every scale, it is a family that embraces the country's economy.

In every meeting I attended in Ankara and in every statement and interview I shared in the media, I underlined it repeatedly: without regional economies and the contribution they make to the country's national income with their own distinctive assets, this wheel does not turn.

Türkiye does not host a uniform economic structure within itself. Each of its regions, each of its cities works like a different sub-model. As MÜSİAD, thanks to our widespread presence both locally and in our global networks, we spread as far as the nerve endings of our country and obtain the economic and commercial information there instantly. At the same time, in order to respond instantly to the demands and troubles of our members and to carry these more quickly to the authorized channels, we built a structure that works far more efficiently and quickly than our old system and that can give instant responses, and we called it the Renewal process.

Esteemed friends,

There is a matter I always raise. We greatly resemble the German economy. The dynamics of both of us are the same. Our SME structures. Our SMEs today account for % 73 of employment, %57 of total production and %65 of our country's total turnover. Their share in exports is another proof that they are our country's locomotive element. Our SMEs, in Anatolia, have in fact shouldered our country's economic weight all by themselves. For this reason we have argued for years that, if a calculation of incentive efficiency is to be made at the point of distributing incentives and supports, the incentive and support system must first be reviewed anew. Finally, under the leadership of our esteemed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,

seeing that particular attention was drawn to this situation in the Economic Reform Package that was announced gave us hope.

Another important point in the package is the headings of emphasizing the importance of domestic and national industrialization and of city economies, and of shifting production to domestic resources, above all in state procurement, in order to reduce import dependency.

My dear brothers and sisters, inflation stands before us today as one of our country's most important problems. We have stated repeatedly that the most effective solution in the struggle against inflation is that production planning be carried out effectively. Production, production, production.

The pandemic reminded us of one more thing: being self-sufficient. If you recall, within the rules of globalization, the free movement of goods and capital had made countries somewhat lazy about production and about making use of their own resources. Multinational firms could easily come to resource-rich countries, carry out production in those countries in favour of their own countries and transfer the profit to their own countries. Take note: the new era will be a century in which national economies come to the fore and every country clings tightly to its own resources and to its domestic and national capital. At the head of these resources come, of course, water, agricultural lands, seed, our animals, our mines, the plants unique to us and used in medical production, our energy resources, our human power and, of course, national capital together with our national companies that keep us standing in every channel and in every crisis.

It would be a correct step to increase the self-sufficiency policies of all our sectors in critical positions in domestic and national production, and in particular to determine a new strategy directed at foreign trade.

Because in a country the value of the national currency is determined by that country's power of production and investment. Nor is it enough merely to produce; with a sales-oriented production planning logic we will first calculate domestic demand well and then foreign market demand, and determine our periodic production quantities and our product groups. Nor is that enough; this time we will operate a system that supports our investment areas and our investors. We call this, in short, production-trade-investment synchronization.

Nor did we content ourselves with this: in order for production to continue without interruption in every circumstance, to eliminate the problems experienced by the enterprises we call micro SMEs, which have not been able to reach SME status, before their transition to organized industrial zones, and in order to restructure them according to the new conditions and circumstances of the future and to ensure their growth, we developed our business model of medium-scale industrial zones that will work like SME incubation centres and turned it into the investment and production bases project. This project was taken under state protection by the SBB itself. All of these are steps we have taken to make it easier for you to grow your businesses and to stay standing in difficult conditions.

My Esteemed Friends,

There is no such thing as impossible. In difficult days a greater fortitude and a greater patience come to a person from God. We are people who believe, who bow before no power other than God, and who are loyal to His community. With God first, we overcome whatever is called difficult.

During the pandemic we achieved something that was said to be impossible: we held MÜSİAD EXPO 2020, the largest fair held during the pandemic, which drew intense interest from exhibitors and visitors alike, with broad participation, and we completed it successfully.

Nearly 15 thousand visitors from 102 countries, above all from Europe, Asia-Pacific, Eurasia, Africa and the MENA countries, 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 collaborations, while also allowing foreign investors to examine investment opportunities in our country closely.

Distinguished Guests,

In this process, in which I have travelled inch by inch and personally touched every one of its cities, holding conversations in person with my brothers there and consulting with them, addressing the problems of every province and every sector and even at the scale of individual firms, today I am in Düzce

While the Düzce economy has a dynamic structure, its position between two metropolitan cities, İstanbul and Ankara, plays an important role in this quality. In this respect, the province's proximity to ports and raw material

resources, its ease of transport and its possession of sea and nature tourism make it a centre of attraction for investment and investors.

While the proportion of land defined as absolute agricultural land in Düzce hovers around %15, hazelnut production comes to the fore. Düzce's share in Türkiye in hazelnut production has risen to %15.

Düzce, which in 2020 ranked 31st among Türkiye's largest exporting provinces and 9th within the Black Sea Region, increased its exports by %30.9, raising them from USD 245.2 million to the level of 321.0 million.

In this period, in Düzce, which carried out exports of goods and services to a total of 131 countries, the first three places were taken by the Netherlands, Denmark and Italy.

There is no obstacle before us to carrying the city's success in production and exports even higher.

Esteemed friends, as MÜSİAD we support our fellow travellers with our 89 points in Türkiye and our 225 contact points in 95 countries around the world. And now we are launching a brand-new restructuring movement in order to unite them with a strong trade and investment network. We, together with each of our members, have brought this valuable structure — which works harder every day to be of benefit to the Turkish economy and to the nation with the 2 million jobs it provides — to this point. 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 the business world with a picture that sets out all the risks, opportunities and current problems.

Distinguished Guests,

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 openings we planned and promised within the framework of our Renewal process. Now we are gathering the fruits of this process with our large-scale projects.

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

To this end, our total of 23 committees under the roof of the MÜSİAD ASSEMBLY, which we established during the Renewal process, have begun to gather potential investors and industrialists in Anatolia around specific projects, with projects compatible with their own thematic or sectoral fields. These projects have begun to encourage the capital power in Anatolia to invest in projects or to become partners in them.

For example, with our Investment and Production Bases Project we created a model that, by building living and production zones where all their needs will be met in the same environment for our small-scale firms which have difficulty producing in narrow spaces and therefore cannot reach scale, will in time turn them into institutionalized firms ready to move to organized industrial zones. We have completed the first prototype of this model, and we are shortly beginning 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 are likely to recur under any circumstances, we must establish production bases. By establishing production bases, it becomes possible to protect firms, employees and production in epidemic or severe disaster situations and to continue without a full lockdown.

We 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 art environments are met within the same living space, aims to create a safe production and living space both for our workers and for our producers and their families.

This project of ours too was one of the works planned from the centre and transferred towards Anatolia. At the same time this project was registered as a project under state protection by the SBB within the scope of 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, with its opportunities targeting the population crammed into big cities and especially women's and young people's enterprises, we developed an initiative to make rural life attractive and to support rural development.

Today many of our members in Anatolia are carrying out preparatory work in order to implement this initiative in their own regions. Every subject that we designed during the Renewal process and turned into committee

names has become new fields and strategies not only in today's world but in tomorrow's world as well. We saw this process years ago and made our plans accordingly. Look: the Renewal process, which was criticized at first because it was not understood, has today become a mechanism that distinguishes MÜSİAD from many comparable institutions and that positively differentiates us from all other institutions in the eyes of the public, of politics and of the state alike. This is no coincidence; it is the result of the strategic mind being able to read processes and outcomes correctly. Renewal is a project systematics. Rather than unwieldy structures, it means that both our branches and the head office undertake new projects while remaining in cooperation, and that the Head Office develops the projects of our branches by giving them far greater support. The Renewal process, whose integration in the Anatolian and international networks was disrupted because of the pandemic, will continue in the new period from where it left off in the eyes of all our branches.

Many more projects of ours, like those I have listed above, have been 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; and, in line with the 2023 targets, growing selected SMEs in 20 places and 23 locations to turn them into Türkiye and World Brands. This and many other projects have become the fruits of MÜSİAD's Renewal adventure.

We have created a MÜSİAD Brand in 6 fundamental fields in line with Türkiye's 6 fundamental 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),

MÜSİAD ACADEMY, in order to turn education into a MÜSİAD school and to give it an institutional identity.

2023 YER-EL (20 YER 23 EL), covering the work directed at our Anatolian firms in order to increase branding and companies' brand values, to bring World Brands out of Türkiye and to turn our SMEs into large-scale corporate brands,

MÜSİAD INVEST (MÜSİAD YATIRIM), in order to turn the reliability advantage and the field of the MÜSİAD Brand in Türkiye's investment strategies, and savings kept under the mattress, into mass investments and partnerships, and to establish a systematics of investment funds,

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

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

Our Qard al-Hasan Fund, one of the finest applications of this tradition, is a balm on wounds thanks to the goodwill of our members, and it 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 a desire to continue an ancient tradition, has transformed the culture of mutual aid and solidarity among our members into an institutional structure, which we created with the thought of making our merchants' trade easier, and 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 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 that comes from being soldiers of the same consciousness and of the same cause, and when the time comes we hand the flag over to the 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 Düzce General Assembly will bring blessings and that our branch's contributions to our business world will continue and increase. I wish success to our branch president, to the board of directors, to the MÜSİAD Women's Committee and to our Young MÜSİAD brothers. I thank our MÜSİAD Local High Board President Ahmet Bey and our local relations committee, as well as our production and trade high board president Oktay Bey, our professional staff and everyone who has contributed.

I greet you all with respect and affection.

Abdurrahman Kaan

President of MÜSİAD