MÜSİAD 25TH ORDINARY GENERAL ASSEMBLY
PRESIDENTIAL SESSION
4 MAY 2019
MÜSİAD HEAD OFFICE
Mr. President,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
On the occasion of our 25th Ordinary General Assembly and the opening of our new Head Office building, I present my respects with the joy we feel at hosting you; welcome, you have honoured us with your presence.
Mr. President,
As MÜSİAD, while we prepare in a brand-new venue for a brand-new and renewed MÜSİAD; just two days before Ramadan, the sultan of the eleven months and the gateway of mercy, abundance and forgiveness; your acceptance of the invitation of such enthusiastic and courageous people whose cause is Türkiye has honoured us. May your participation bring goodness and abundance. As on every occasion, may renewal, revival and hope be refreshed with you today as well. Welcome once again, you have honoured us.
Mr. President,
In the morning session of our General Assembly we stated that we are travellers of long roads. We said that we are not sprinters but marathon runners. We said that even if we grow tired we do not stop; stopping does not befit us.
Together with our esteemed President above all, with whom we have walked this road since our foundation and whose support has added strength to our path, and with you, the valued members of the MÜSİAD Family, we have left 29 years behind by growing stronger, by expanding and by standing upright in the face of countless obstacles.
Praise be to God for these days of ours.
For our unity, our togetherness, our path and our struggle; praise be to God.
Mr. President,
There was a time when, let alone realising certain dreams, it was not even possible to speak of them.
To dream is the common matter of people of a cause. Yet to make those people believe in a dream and to set out on the road is a matter of leadership. Today, as the MÜSİAD family, we repeat for our own processes the words of our leader, our President, who made us dream of a Great Türkiye, who made us believe in this dream, who set us on the road for this dream and who, praise be to God, has built today’s Türkiye: “No stopping! Onward!”
MÜSİAD will continue to walk with the same motto today and tomorrow, as it did yesterday. Within the perspective drawn by our leader, of whom we say that his word is our word and his path is our path, we will advance to the very end behind our love of country.
In the verses of the Master;
“We walk on, we walk along the trace of the road of light,
With stone at our breast and waters at our knees, we walk on,
One day evening falls, and we too depart.
And our song remains upon the lips.” *
Mr. President,
Our Song is a Great Türkiye; our cause is a Great Türkiye.
We grieve with this song and we rejoice with this song,
We never refrain from singing it, in good days and in bad,
The secret of our future lies in this song.
Mr. President,
As the world changes, Türkiye is now a strong and effective player in the international arena.
The economic and political environment to which a strengthening Türkiye is exposed does not intimidate us. On the contrary, it emboldens and encourages us to make greater moves and to take bolder steps on the road to progress.
As I have repeated on every occasion and on every platform, on the road to a strong Türkiye MÜSİAD will be at the service of its nation and its state with its field presence on the local and global scale, its sectoral competence, its number of members and the richness of its profile, its sphere of influence extending from production to employment and from exports to investment, and its projects and activities reaching every segment of the social structure.
As you know, following the 24 June Elections Türkiye chose to change its own paradigms of governance and moved to a far stronger understanding of administration.
This historic decision is a turning point for the tomorrows of our country.
In this new system, which accelerates decision-making and implementation processes and brings competence and a target-oriented understanding of solutions to the fore, the fundamental duty falling to us was;
to give weight to our own institutional and structural transformation in order to facilitate and accelerate the functioning of the system.
As MÜSİAD, with this aim, in this 29-year-old institution, remaining absolutely faithful and committed to our core values and our founding purposes, we are changing our own paradigms of management and implementation.
Our aim is clear:
To make MÜSİAD’s sphere of influence and power far more effective and productive for the benefit of our country and our state; and of course, in this way, to continue as a far stronger companion along the road we have taken together.
Mr. President,
In the closing speech of MÜSİAD EXPO 2018, which you honoured with your presence without leaving us alone, I had spoken of the first steps of a change and a renewal we were about to enter.
With your permission, today I would like to share, in their matured form, the causes and consequences of this process of renewal and Renewal and the steps we have taken and will take in this process:
With the awareness of being a widespread capital platform, MÜSİAD is now determined to be a strong bridge of connection between four important areas.
The First Bridge is between macro policies and field knowledge.
MÜSİAD commands the field with the network it has established in 81 provinces and at 86 points, and abroad in 94 countries and at 224 contact points. By conveying the micro-scale information it compiles to decision-makers, it aims to help policies be determined more soundly and more effectively.
Likewise, at the point of putting macro policies into practice, it ensures that decisions spread to the grassroots through concrete projects and working groups. In the period ahead it will continue by strengthening this key position even further. The Second Bridge is between the Global and the Local.
In the same way, MÜSİAD will both operate its active structure at home and abroad as an economic intelligence mechanism and, by matching entrepreneurs’ investment areas with resource facilities, will ensure that the production-trade-partnership line is strengthened. We have named this system we have developed the MÜSİAD PLANNING AND BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT DEVELOPMENT FIELD - in short, MÜSİAD SAHA.
MÜSİAD SAHA will therefore initiate a process of providing an environment and of persuasion so that Türkiye, as an economic and commercial partner, attracts investment on a global scale.
SAHA will work like a locomotive of resource creation, export development and production.
To describe its functioning briefly;
1. To determine investment areas, to explain Türkiye’s new-era investment policy abroad face to face and to attract investors: at our new regional bases, which we call the Prestige Zone, the Partnership Zone and the Trade Zone, we plan to develop alternative fields of power for our country in parallel with new trade routes and logistics lines.
2. To establish bases in the trade of goods and services and to reach the untapped trade areas of the world. In this way MÜSİAD aims both to develop exports in volume and to diversify them in terms of goods and services groups.
3. To match producers and entrepreneurs active at home, most of whom are SMEs, with partners found abroad. MÜSİAD thus plans, by carrying out needs analyses, to open the international field to entrepreneurs and to guide them through its own organisational network. Our fundamental starting point is, in this way, both to increase domestic production on the basis of goods and services groups and to encourage its diversity.
4. To process instant information coming from the field abroad in order to develop Türkiye’s exports and to inform the administrations in advance about the possible consequences of these changes. To this end MÜSİAD underlines the importance of first-hand access to clean information as the basic condition for producing policies and projects. It is thus restructuring itself on the path to becoming a stakeholder and a partner in order to initiate proactive decision-making processes before the state and the government.
Mr. President,
On the investment-trade-production axis MÜSİAD now aims to develop both its own capital and the capital strength of its members, and thereby to multiply national wealth and to grow.
To this end we are establishing RESOURCE AND CAPITAL GENERATION OFFICES in which all financial and operational processes will be followed separately. At the end of the matching and needs-identification processes between global networks and local structures, we have named the capital and resource multiplication model that this network structure will create within itself MÜSİAD INVEST.
The interest-free accumulation of resources that multi-partner structures will bring us will make us far more effective and far stronger. GABORAS and the Venture Capital Funds, which we have developed to date, are not an alternative in financing and funding but examples of our efforts to develop resources in capital.
For the goal of development based not on debt but on production, building “production-trade bases” where entrepreneurs can do business together and act together was already among our concrete projects. The Organised Industrial Zone Project designed for this purpose aims to develop 200 medium-sized enterprises every year and to bring 20,000 companies and an output worth USD 200 billion into the national income over ten years. The project is proceeding at full speed.
As you see, in the new era MÜSİAD is initiating a period of economic expansion through partnerships with a sales-oriented understanding of planning and production. We have completed all our infrastructure work on this matter, praise be to God.
As for the answer to the question of what the MÜSİAD of tomorrow is;
MÜSİAD, which is multi-stakeholder, which is expanding with corporate members and which is broadening its field organisation sectorally in Anatolia, in İstanbul and across the world with a new understanding and a new model, now defines itself as a capital base and an economic data centre.
Our starting point and MÜSİAD’s motto for the new era are clear: TOGETHER! IF OUR CAUSE IS TÜRKİYE, THEN CERTAINLY TOGETHER!
Mr. President,
The human being first. The human being first!
For MÜSİAD the human being is not a resource but a value.
Given the vital importance of a qualified workforce, we are giving an even more institutional identity to the MÜSİAD tradition, which has worked like a school to this day, and we are establishing MÜSİAD ACADEMY.
Here we plan to train the qualified workforce the country needs in almost every field of expertise and to prepare them for economic life by opening up areas of work for them and giving them experience.
Within this logic we are establishing the “MÜSİAD ENDERUN” structure with a “training qualified business people” programme for young businessmen from a very early age.
ENDERUN will train individuals capable of being active in every channel of economic and commercial life and of working in industry, in academia and in the public sector.
Today MÜSİAD works not only as a capital organisation but as a social stakeholder and as Türkiye’s project generation and implementation platform.
In the new era MÜSİAD will maintain its working logic through efficient and thematic project groups and committees far removed from bureaucracy.
We will continue to open new areas compatible with the changing conditions of the new economic architecture and to develop concrete, solution-focused projects in those areas.
As you know, MÜSİAD insistently emphasises national capital and national output in three fundamental sectors: the Defence Industry, the Manufacturing Industry and, of course, most importantly, Agriculture and Livestock.
In the new era, particularly in agriculture and livestock, we have formed our committees under the names of agricultural development, national seed, industrial agriculture, domestic and national brands in food, food safety, rural transformation and urban agriculture.
Our aim is to lift our country out of the position of buying from abroad what it consumes at its own table.
Mr. President,
In the new era MÜSİAD has completed all its infrastructure work in order to operate more actively and more systematically than ever in the fields of culture, art and sport, in the field of education and in the fields of social responsibility and legislative development, for the survival and the integrity of its country, its history, its values and its generations.
For a more effective and more productive female workforce, we are giving our Women’s working group a far more institutional structure under the name MÜSİAD WOMEN.
Reviving the female workforce in the business world and making it active through MÜSİAD WOMEN with its 200 members is among our plans. In the new era YOUNG MÜSİAD will work like a substructure organisation with its far more active and expanding structure. In the end all our efforts are so that we may exist in the world of young people. Youth is our future.
As I bring my words to an end here, Mr. President, I consider it a duty to extend special thanks to your person for your vision, which has encouraged us along this road, and for honouring today’s programme with your presence.
MÜSİAD is a love of Türkiye.
MÜSİAD is a cause of the ummah.
The strength of the heart is entrusted to the fidelity of the word;
MÜSİAD is the friendly voice of hard times.
May Almighty God, for the sake of the approaching month of Ramadan, make the new era we have begun with the motto “in good days and in bad, together from eternity to eternity” beneficial for our country and for the MÜSİAD family.
With these feelings, I thank everyone who contributed to this fine organisation and greet you all with respect and affection. Abdurrahman Kaan
President of MÜSİAD
- Necip Fazıl Kısakürek - Our Song