MÜSİAD ADIYAMAN GENERAL ASSEMBLY

6 August 2021

Honourable Members of Parliament,

Honourable Mayor,

Honourable Rector,

Esteemed Presidents and Representatives of the Adıyaman Business World, of the Political Parties, of the Chambers, the Commodity Exchange and the NGOs,

Esteemed Members of our MÜSİAD Board of Directors,

My Branch Presidents Who Have Come from the Neighbouring Provinces (K.Maraş, Diyarbakır, Şanlıurfa)

The Venerable Former Presidents of our Adıyaman Branch,

The Esteemed President and Members of our Adıyaman Branch,

My Brothers of Young MÜSİAD,

Esteemed Members of the Press,

I greet you with respect at the General Assembly of our Adıyaman Branch; welcome, you have brought joy with you.

Distinguished Guests,

For some time now we have been experiencing the happiness of being able to hold our general assemblies and our meetings face to face, of coming together with you, our esteemed friends, and having a heart-to-heart talk.

Immediately after entering the normalization process thanks to the rise in vaccination rates and the high level of compliance with the measures, we are making use of every opportunity in order to be informed about every point of our homeland; we are travelling the length and breadth of our country. Within the scope of the visits we carry out in order to touch more people, last week we visited 7 of our provinces, this week we were in Aksaray and Kırşehir, and today we are in Adıyaman.

Adıyaman is a city of ours whose economy is predominantly based on agriculture, but which in recent years has shown a tendency towards industrialization, especially in textile, food and marble sector investments.

While industry in the province takes shape in the form of large, medium and small-scale enterprises, the private sector creates more added value than the public sector. In particular, together with private sector production, the fact that approximately %20 of our country’s crude oil is extracted in this region constitutes a serious value for the Adıyaman economy.

Adıyaman, which possesses different investment opportunities ranging from agriculture to livestock breeding and from mining to various sectors, achieved an important success in 2020, a year in which exports decreased across the country, by increasing its exports by %60.2 compared with the previous year.

Adıyaman, which imported USD 67 million despite its exports of USD 106 million, became one of our provinces that gave a foreign trade surplus in this period.

The Ready-Made Clothing and Apparel group, whose share in the province’s total exports is %68, stands as the backbone of Adıyaman’s foreign trade.

In addition, we believe that Adıyaman, where many products such as wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, cotton, tobacco, pistachios and grapes are grown, also carries an important potential in agricultural exports. Indeed, ensuring product diversity in the province’s exports will spread the risk, reduce dependence on a single product group and save Adıyaman from a fragile structure.

The province’s exports, which rose to approximately USD 550 million in 2015, are a highly important indicator for showing Adıyaman’s true potential. In this context we see Adıyaman’s increase of its exports by %72.1 in the first 6 months of 2021 compared with the same period of the previous year as an important step taken towards this potential.

Distinguished Guests, My Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The pandemic, which has been continuing for more than 1 year, created a wave of panic and shock all over the world, and today countries are striving in order to be able to enter a rapid recovery process.

We can now see this clearly: even if the disease-related effects of the pandemic come to an end, the world is now on the threshold of implementing a new economic order and entirely new rules.

Therefore we are now obliged to follow the new models of development and growth, that is, the new business development models of the new world order.

For this it is necessary to ensure that investments are attracted in the right way, channelled to the right places, and that investors are reached and guided. Alongside this, of course, it is also essential that the values particular to each city of our country be explained far better. And this is possible only through a new investment network that is spread to every part of the world, that draws investment, production and trade information from every point, that knows investment environments and that establishes the system to bring investors together with the companies in Türkiye.

We express this at every opportunity: “in the future it is not states but cities that will compete”. For this reason it is essential that regional economies, city economies, be created. In this way we will have cities that are self-sufficient and that have been able to turn their own assets into value.

The branding of cities and the transformation of their existing assets into value, that is, the determination of their potential and the increase of the provinces’ values through investments suited to these potentials, is an extremely important matter.

On the journeys in which we tour every point of Türkiye, we obtain a number of data. And with these data and the experience brought by being in direct contact with you, we formed a project, and matching cities became the fundamental starting point of this project of ours. We gave this work the name “Developing and Branding Cities with Their Distinctive Values”.

Determining a correct industrialization policy comes about by finding, supporting, enlarging the scale of and increasing the capital strength of promising companies that will keep this economy on its feet in order to create city economies, and, with the domestic-national production drive, both branding the cities and strengthening the companies. I call this putting city economies to work for the implementation of industrialization.

The brand province we have matched with Adıyaman, which is USD 3 billion in size according to GDP calculations, has been Marrakesh, which forms a transition point between the Atlantic and Morocco and is known as the “Red City".

In Marrakesh, whose USD 12 billion economy is based on tourism, textiles, trade and handicrafts, the luxury and boutique hotel experience has helped to improve the city’s tourism infrastructure. The maintenance of a strong tourism infrastructure has caused it to become a favourite place for tourists and celebrities and to be turned into a venue for international events.

We believe that, when handled with the right strategy, Adıyaman too possesses this potential.

Distinguished Guests,

In fact we also regard our City Economies Development project as a road map in Türkiye’s determination of a new investment policy.

The only capital organization that can give support to the realization in Türkiye of these works, which appear difficult but which can be brought to life through sound organization and hard work, is MÜSİAD.

Because the organization that understands the language of both the industrialist and the SME, that develops projects, that with its renewed structure is more dynamic and that, with its widespread reach, can most effectively conduct the commercial-economic diplomacy and the investment diplomacy between the world and Türkiye is again MÜSİAD.

The primary duty that falls to us must first of all be a change of mindset. That is, to handle investment not in the form of merely calling companies in certain countries here as partners, but in the form of presenting Türkiye as an investment market. And it must be to grow in a healthy way the SME elements that are the locomotive of domestic production and, with the advantages of the economy of scale, to bring them together with foreign partners and fund owners, that is, a kind of matchmaking.

Dear Friends,

With the aim of preparing in advance for the new world system, we as MÜSİAD launched our Renewal process and determined our motto for setting out as “Together”.

And to the next term we leave the word “WE ARE HERE”.

For Türkiye — in production, in trade, in investment, in every field of society from art to culture, in solidarity, for the development and prosperity of our country — we always say “we are here”.

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

Our committees, with projects suited to their own thematic or sectoral fields, have begun to gather the potential investors and industrialists in Anatolia around certain projects.

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 will build, for our small-scale companies that struggle to produce in narrow spaces and therefore cannot reach scale, living and production zones where all their needs will be met in the same environment, and that will in time turn them into institutionalized companies ready to move to the organized industrial zones. We have completed the first prototype of this model, and the construction of the second will also begin soon.

On the other hand, 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 to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as a model.

Many more projects like these have been produced by our committees and spread to the grassroots.

With God’s permission, you will be the means, through this integration process of ours in the branches, for our MÜSİAD to be carried much further forward.

Distinguished Guests, Dear Friends,

Because of the pandemic, 2020 was a difficult year in many fields, above all in the economy.

Türkiye experienced the first shock of this tremor and then drew a successful recovery curve.

This situation was reflected in our capacity utilization rates. And our manufacturing industry has settled into a notable course of development over the last two quarters.

Here I would like to touch upon a point I find important:

As Türkiye, we absolutely must eliminate at the earliest possible time the two fundamental factors that force inflationary pressure.

The first is to be self-sufficient. That is, to carry out domestically as well the production of the nearly USD 175 billion of intermediate goods that are imported, to minimize external dependence and of course to give up seeing money as a commodity instrument.

The second is to provide resident savers with new and reliable investment opportunities in which they can put to use the foreign currency and the gold they hold and their money in interest or profit-share accounts.

Establishing venture capital funds through which projects will be securitized and, over these funds, reinforcing the culture of partnership and thereby encouraging production in Türkiye must also be a matter with which we absolutely have to concern ourselves.

We may evaluate this growth of %7 in the first quarter as the harbinger of the exit from the pandemic. Indeed, with the base effect we may even see the growth rate in the second quarter above %15. However, for this situation to be sustainable comes about through achieving investment-production-trade synchronization and setting out production as the fundamental economic policy.

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

Esteemed Guests, my brothers of MÜSİAD

Every duty has a term and an end; but responsibility, independently of that duty, lasts far longer. There are some duties whose responsibility you carry upon you for a lifetime, even if their term comes to an end.

As you know, in a short while I will hand over the duty of the Presidency of MÜSİAD. But this handover will not change the responsibility I feel, and will carry throughout my life, towards our MÜSİAD, towards our fellow travellers and towards our country.

Dear friends, for 4 years I strove to be a president who kept his finger on the pulse of the business world and of the field.

Contact with our members, consultation and fellowship with them, the constant hosting of the branches in Anatolia at the Head Office and thus the raising to the highest level of the closeness between the centre and the FIELD, has been my fundamental goal.

We express it at every opportunity; MÜSİAD is a school, a home. And we are marathon runners. I believe that our friends who will take over the duty and continue this marathon will show every effort they can in order to carry our MÜSİAD much further forward than we have.

On this occasion I ask you to give me your blessing.

Before completing my speech with these feelings, I wish ease above all to our nation, to the duty teams and to the state officials who are struggling against the fires that have occurred at more than one point of our country.

May my Lord grant that these fires, which burn our hearts, come to an end as soon as possible. As MÜSİAD, from the first day until now we have been reaching the regions damaged by the fires and, through our branches, giving support to the people of the region and to our state. And until we get through these difficult days, we will always be ready to do whatever is in our power.

Distinguished Guests,

Wishing that our branch’s general assembly may be a means of goodness, I wish success to our Adıyaman branch president and to the board of directors.

I pray to Almighty God that our branch will continue, increasing them, the contributions it offers with its work to the business world and to our country.

Thanking everyone who has contributed to this organization, I greet you with respect and affection. May God protect you.

Abdurrahman KAAN

President of MÜSİAD