MÜSİAD KONYA GENERAL ASSEMBLY - JUNE 2021

Esteemed Founding President of MÜSİAD,

Esteemed President of the 2nd Term,

Esteemed AK Party Konya Provincial Chairman,

Esteemed Presidents and Representatives of the Konya Business World and of the NGOs,

My Esteemed Members of the MÜSİAD Board of Directors,

Our branch presidents who have come from the neighbouring provinces,

Former presidents of our Konya Branch,

Esteemed President and Members of our MÜSİAD Konya Branch,

My Young MÜSİAD brothers and sisters ,

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

Distinguished Guests,

Despite the difficult conditions of the pandemic, I am glad to be in contact with Anatolia as far as circumstances permit by means of 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 the most effective and most widespread capital platform in the field, one whose equal is rarely to be found. With this quality it has penetrated into the very capillaries of our country, both economically and socially, and it advances with the strength that comes from commanding even the finest detail of field knowledge.

These days, praise be to God, the normalization conditions we have moved into — as a result both of the steadily increasing effect of vaccination and of the effective policies our state has implemented in managing the pandemic — are finally bringing us together once more. The full normalization we will move to with the month of July will be reflected positively both in our economic life and in our social peace.

For this pandemic has adversely affected not only the balances of production and trade, but also the spiritual balance of our people and even, unfortunately, their family lives. I have always kept my conviction that everything will gradually fall into place. Yet it is useful to say it again: this is a global pandemic, and to think that it will end suddenly and completely would be a very naive dream. With the new measures, supports and incentives we will develop against the fluctuations that will arise from time to time, we as a country will manage this process successfully to the very end. Indeed, while all the countries of the world were contracting severely, our country achieved a substantial growth rate together with China, and we thus proved once again just how dynamic an economy we possess even under the most difficult conditions.

Yet I find it useful to underline one point in particular here: should the principal actor of sustainable development be growth, or a stable economy that is not highly volatile and is supported by deep-rooted investments? Which of the two is more reassuring both for the industrialist and for the potential investor? I raise this question briefly here and will share its answer with you within a broad perspective later on. For in the period ahead, this is the key point for our competitive strength and our advantages in the new world order and its markets.

Distinguished Guests, my MÜSİAD brothers and sisters,

With little time left before I hand over the Presidency, I have been constantly on the road at every opportunity — for my homeland and for our MÜSİAD, within which I have grown up 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 listen to sectoral problems directly from those concerned and convey them to the relevant authorities. 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 take both joy and honour in this. For MÜSİAD is not a capital group confined to a single region with a narrow sphere of influence. MÜSİAD is the most living witness to this country’s social, political and economic history, and indeed one of the elements that built it.

At the same time, this policy has made us structurally dynamic, both in standing by them in times of crisis such as the pandemic and in identifying our members’ strong and weak sides on the spot and at once. Indeed, the renewal process we carried out within two and a half years required a managerial mindset of this scale. As I hand over my duty to my fellow travellers like a relay race, I am entrusting to them both a system and a motto. I believe with all my heart that MÜSİAD’s brotherhood and MÜSİAD’s dynamism will nurture every kind of fresh mindset within themselves and embrace them as new branches worthy of this mighty plane tree.

Esteemed Friends,

As will be recalled, last year, following the first tremor in economic activity after the initial shock of the pandemic, the recovery process that set Türkiye apart from comparable countries drew the attention of the entire world.

The Turkish economy, which grew by %1.8 in the whole of 2020, became the fastest-growing economy within the G20 after China in the first quarter of 2021.

For our part, we had stated that we saw this %7 growth as the harbinger of the exit from the pandemic, and that this development showed the world that the centre of investment, production and trade is Türkiye.

With the effect of the easing of the lockdowns imposed because of the pandemic and of strong fiscal incentives, we believe that the Turkish economy’s positive growth trend will continue in the period ahead as well.

Despite the slowdown in credit growth and high interest rates, the increasing pace of vaccination raises our expectations that economic activity will gain momentum, particularly in the third quarter that will begin with July and thereafter.

As MÜSİAD, we believe that we can comfortably reach the %5.8 GDP growth we target for 2021 within the scope of the New Economy Program (NEP).

Current data also support this expectation of ours.

With the revival of economic activity that had contracted because of pandemic conditions, we believe that the contribution of domestic demand to growth will record an increase.

We completed 2020 with the difficult conditions and consequences of the pandemic, and we have at last entered the second half of 2021 under conditions of normalization.

Economic and commercial activities that had contracted all over the world have finally begun to open up and even to expand. Yet particularly in taking a share of investments, while the developed countries have fallen behind, the developing countries attracted the world’s foreign direct investment at a rate reaching %70. Our country, on the other hand, could not take the share it wanted from this fertile flow.

When the last twenty-year period is considered, the data show that for the first time our figures for attracting foreign direct investment have fallen and that some foreign investors have moved away from our country.

This situation is a sign that in the period ahead we stand at the threshold of a highly critical era in terms of sustainable development.

The %7 growth rate we achieved in the first quarter of 2021 despite the difficult conditions of the pandemic is a very great success; yet unfortunately it is not sufficient for sustainable development.

The inflationary environment we are currently in and high credit costs show that we are still a risky area for investment.

Great duties fall to us here. Investment in the world is now made and defined under entirely new conditions.

Keeping pace with this change, we too must approach investment not merely as inviting companies in certain countries to become partners here, but as promoting Türkiye as an investment market.

We must promote Türkiye to the foreign direct investor as an investment and trade market, operate MÜSİAD’s international field presence like a trade and investment system, and for this purpose establish a structure that will work under the umbrella of the state. Its models have been determined. With this system, fund flows will be directed towards project partnership through MÜSİAD, an institution of proven reliability in Türkiye, and in this way it will both set investment diplomacy in motion and draw the active investment diaspora abroad to our country.

My esteemed friends,

Two important concepts are now at the very centre of our economic life, and just like trade diplomacy, these too are, in their origin and definition, MÜSİAD’s own discourse:

  • Investment diplomacy: making good use of the language that investment has formed on the basis of the industrialist knowing the industrialist and his organization
  • Investment diaspora: our national elements, who make us proud with their active investments abroad, directing their fields of investment towards our country as well

As I also expressed at the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) Meeting I attended in Gebze on Tuesday: the world today is passing through days in which the importance of countries preserving their own strength, being able to be self-sufficient and having a say in international competition is emphasized.

As in the past, so today, the picture revealed by mass crises shows that countries walking alone lag behind in eliminating the adverse conditions and consequences the crisis has brought, and that they are left alone in this matter as well. Within this framework, when we as business people are able to conduct diplomacy together with our own potential and effort for doing trade, economic developments that can be clearly observed over the years emerge. We must follow these very closely.

My Dear Brothers and Sisters,

We travel every inch of our country, thinking of how we can contribute more to our homeland and how we can be of benefit. And today, in Konya, we have come together with you, our esteemed friends who carry the same ideal as we do.

Konya, which is also referred to as Türkiye’s “Agricultural Capital” owing to its vast agricultural areas, its different agro-ecological sub-regions, its geographical position and the many agricultural products it produces, has in recent years recorded great advances in industry as well.

In Konya, more than %90 of whose land is suitable for agriculture, while industry has developed in connection with agriculture, the machinery manufacturing, automotive supply industry and basic metal sectors have also recorded growth at great speed.

My Esteemed Friends,

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 had been producing and trading with globalization and the economic wind it spread 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. In the new world order, in which protectionist policies increasingly come to the fore, our new threat perceptions have unfortunately begun to form.

At the head of these, of course, are: the effective use of agricultural land, food sufficiency, food safety, food prices that will rise on account of drought and the inflationary pressure this will create throughout the world, the formation of national policies on seeds, reducing imports in food to a minimum and entering the category of self-sufficient countries.

Alongside all this, the difficult 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 us to adopt is the effective and efficient use of the ever-increasing basic resources, that is, of water and soil.

I say it at every opportunity: energy is of course 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. I explained the same issue in detail this month at the commission meeting of the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye at which the subjects of Climate Change and Clean Energy were addressed. Believe me, the MÜSİAD presentation, our projects and the future-oriented strategies I described were all listened to with attention and interest by the members of the commission, and thanks were extended by the deputies of every party.

Looked at from this perspective, in the world economic order of the new era Konya is one of Türkiye’s most important trump cards and key cities on the world’s geo-economic atlas.

Yet to speak of Konya as a city limited to agriculture would be an injustice to its capacity and to the contribution it makes to Türkiye’s national income.

With 9 organized industrial zones, 19 small industrial estates, 15 small industrial estates located in the provincial centre, 11 small industrial estates located in the districts of Konya province and 14 private industrial estates, it is one of the provinces that shoulder the employment and industrial burden of the Turkish economy.

In 2020, when exports declined across Türkiye, Konya increased its total export volume by %8.3 compared with the previous year, and the fact that the sectors in which it exported most were, respectively, Machinery, Automotive, Cereals/Pulses, Chemicals and the Defence Industry also reveals the distance the Konya economy has covered across the industrial sector.

The cultural and historical riches of Konya, one of the most dynamic cities of the Turkish economy with more than 40,000 SMEs, are shaping the city together with the growing awareness of faith tourism in recent years, and are contributing to a great extent to the city’s development with 2.5 million visitors a year.

Konya, which lies at the centre of Anatolia and is in a position to reach 10 million people in 3 hours and 57 million people in 6 hours by road, and which triggers regional growth thanks to this strategic position, is also one of the important stops on the road we have set out upon in order to develop city economies.

Esteemed Guests, my MÜSİAD brothers and sisters,

The day before yesterday we held a widely attended meeting with the esteemed economy editors of our press at the Conrad Hotel: the purpose of our meeting rested on determining a new road map for the sake of Türkiye’s steadily declining foreign direct investment and for the sound and correct structuring of domestic investments.

Through our work in the renewal process, we modelled investment — which unfortunately does not provide the necessary efficiency when handled on its own — both as a decision-making process and as an element within the synchronization of production, trade and investment. It is from here that the thesis I voiced at the beginning of my speech, that growth alone cannot be a sufficient element for sustainable development, draws its nourishment.

The important matter here is the need to build a new investment strategy in order to write a new story. And this of course passes through establishing an investment network system to carry out the hunt for investors abroad and, more importantly, through making every city — with its own unique, one-of-a-kind values — the address of high value-added investments instead of concentrating investment in certain cities; that is, through replanning city economies.

At the meeting I held with the economy editors we finally found the opportunity to explain our project of developing and branding cities through their own unique values. For one thing is now very clear: we have to keep pace with the sui generis conditions of the new world order. The most important of these is channelling investments correctly and, in particular, adopting city economies as the basic strategy in investment planning.

As I stated just now, from the first day I took office to the final days on which I will hand over my duty, I have striven to be a president who does not merely remain at the Head Office but constantly tries to take the pulse of the field and to be in touch with you, our esteemed members.

For MÜSİAD means THE FIELD. MÜSİAD is the home, the homeland and the school of people devoted to their country like you, who have given their hearts to it. On every city visit I both listened to my members’ fundamental problems or demands and took note of the economy each city would develop around its own unique values.

Esteemed friends, in the future it is not states but cities that will compete, city economies will compete. For this reason every city that develops and becomes a brand is in fact a substantial stock of capital gained for the national income.

While their counterparts in the world — that is, cities possessing similar characteristics — have reached enormous figures both in production volume and in their contribution to GNP, it is not right for our cities that possess the same values to remain economically constrained.

This is possible only through determining the unique values of cities, bringing those values together with suitable investments and investors, constantly monitoring the efficiency of supports and incentives, and of course through that city becoming a brand in the process by which value turns into asset.

The brand province we have taken as a model for Konya is Kyoto, Japan’s brand city in industry, the electronics sector, tourism and weaving. That province’s GDP is USD 115.3 billion. Konya’s, on the other hand, is USD 16.7 billion. With the appropriate incentive and attraction programmes we will implement, and with Konya’s other unique values, for instance agriculture, livestock breeding and its gastro-economy, that is the Konya cuisine, I see, particularly in Konya, that potential to reach USD 40 billion and even to surpass it.

In order to reveal this potential and to increase Konya’s share within the provincial and national economy still further, we as business people will do our utmost with new investments and by using the existing potential at the maximum level.

Distinguished Guests,

As you know, in order to prepare in advance for the new world system, we as MÜSİAD launched our renewal process. Our motto at the outset was “together”. And now we say “WE ARE HERE”. With the peace of mind of having kept the promises I gave you when I first took office and of having fulfilled this sacred duty as it deserves, we leave the word WE ARE HERE to the next term. For Türkiye, in production, in trade, in investment, in every field of society from art to culture, in solidarity, for the development and welfare of our country, we are always here.

We have fulfilled almost all the initiatives 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 national economy and at improving the culture of partnership among our members.

Our 23 committees in total under the roof of the MÜSİAD ASSEMBLY have begun, with projects suited to their own thematic or sectoral fields, to gather the potential investors and industrialists in Anatolia around specific projects.

These projects have begun to encourage the capital power in Anatolia to invest in projects or to become partners in them. With the multi-partner projects of the recent period, 52 project partnership models were developed in our branches. And they have become operational.

For example, with our Investment and Production Bases Project we have created a model that, by building living and production zones in which all their needs will be met in the same environment for our small-scale firms that struggle to produce in narrow spaces and therefore cannot reach economies of 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 have begun the second as well

We must establish production bases for the pandemics and disasters that are likely to recur. By establishing production bases, it becomes possible to protect firms, employees and production in cases of pandemic or severe disaster and to keep them going without a full lockdown.

On the other hand, with our Smart Agricultural Cities Project we launched an initiative to encourage rural development and thereby to support reverse migration and to attain a homogeneous population structure. We presented this as a model to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and introduced it to the press together with our Minister.

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

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

Many more projects like these 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 property buying and selling platform; growing selected SMEs in 20 places and 23 locations in line with the 2023 targets and turning them into Türkiye and World Brands. This project and many others like it have become the fruits of MÜSİAD’s renewal adventure.

The MÜSİAD INVEST, that is (MÜSİAD YATIRIM), brand, which we designed with a far more advanced vision in order to turn the reliability advantage of the MÜSİAD Brand, its field and savings kept under the mattress into mass investments and partnerships within Türkiye’s investment strategies and to establish the systematics of investment funds, and the MÜSİAD TIA (MÜSİAD TRADE and INVESTMENT AGENCIES) system, which we designed together with the Presidency Investment Office in order to promote Türkiye to the foreign direct investor as an investment and trade market and to operate MÜSİAD’s international field presence like a trade and investment system, are, as a first in Türkiye, both meeting with acceptance and favour in the eyes of our state and demonstrating MÜSİAD’s key role in the road map of our country’s new-era investment strategy.

As many of you have witnessed, we are continuing our work without interruption and we shall continue to do so.

God willing, through this integration process of ours in the branches, you will be the means by which our MÜSİAD is carried much further forward. In the coming period as well, the model of integration, of trade and partnership development and of investment network building, both at home and abroad, will be continued from where it left off with the same enthusiasm.

Esteemed Guests,

As I conclude my words here, I wish that our branch’s general assembly may be a means of good; I thank Ömer Faruk Bey, who is handing over his duty, and his board, may God be pleased with them; I also wish success to Hilmi Bey, who will take over the duty, and to his board; I pray to Almighty God that the contributions of our MÜSİAD Konya Branch to the Konya business world and to our country may continue and increase; I greet you all with respect and affection.

May God protect you.

Abdurrahman KAAN

President of MÜSİAD