2 NOVEMBER MÜSİAD EXPO 2022 OPENING CEREMONY SPEECH
Mr. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
Distinguished representatives of the Turkish and international business world,
International purchasing delegations,
Distinguished MÜSİAD Branch Presidents and MÜSİAD Members,
Honourable Guests,
Esteemed Members of the Press,
Before I begin my remarks, I respectfully greet our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has honoured us by attending the opening ceremony of the MÜSİAD EXPO 2022 organization, which begins today at the TÜYAP Fair and Congress Center and will continue until 5 November.
I extend my thanks to our producers and investors who provide added value to Türkiye’s export ecosystem, to our private and public sector stakeholders who encourage the process of developing qualified projects in this field, to our global business partners who aim to strengthen bilateral trade relations with Türkiye, and to the international purchasing delegations taking part in our fair, for being with us today; welcome.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
MÜSİAD, a non-profit organization that has been working with great effort for more than 32 years for the material and spiritual development of Türkiye, stands out as Türkiye’s most widespread business world civil society organization. Reaching 165 branches and contact points — 84 at home and 81 abroad — MÜSİAD provides employment for 2 million people with its more than 13 thousand members and the 60 thousand enterprises belonging to those members. In this framework, we take justified pride in being Türkiye’s largest capital and cooperation platform on both a local and a global scale.
MÜSİAD EXPO, which opens its doors for the 19th time this year, has assumed an important mission in realizing Türkiye’s 2023 export target. Following the pandemic, with MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, which we have coordinated around innovative strategic targets, we wish to carry Türkiye’s export and production vision to a much more advanced level. Our fair offers all our valued participants a different vision of fair organization in which the privileges of the digital world are combined with face-to-face communication.
We are setting our signature to a global organization in which we will announce our domestic and national production power to the world, open up to brand-new markets within the triangle of production, investment and export, and establish dynamic collaborations. With the collaborations and investment projections to be realized within the framework of MÜSİAD EXPO, we aim to be instrumental in approximately USD 5 billion worth of business connections.
Türkiye is advancing with confident steps towards becoming one of the world’s foremost production and export bases. Our country is the center of global and regional trade. With its exports to 217 separate countries and regions, we are flying our flag in every part of the world. The fact that our exports have risen not only in quantity but also in unit value is the most important proof that we have succeeded in our goal of exporting high value-added products.
In a period that began with a health crisis and evolved into a security crisis with the war to the north of the Black Sea, triggering along with it a political crisis and a global economic crisis, Türkiye’s achievement of these successes is a source of pride for all of us. At this point, I would like to underline emphatically that, as MÜSİAD, we are the supporter of every project that will build awareness in the direction of Türkiye’s growth through investment, employment, production, exports and a current account surplus.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
With its political stability, the size of its domestic market, its strategic position, its qualified young population, its advantageous investment incentives and its inexhaustible energy, Türkiye is an attractive investment center in the international arena. Through the cooperation of our Government above all, along with our ministries, our civil society organizations and our private and public institutions, our country has been among the G20 countries that managed the pandemic process most successfully. We are growing stronger through transparent and predictable policies that take competition as a basis within a free market economy. By managing supply chain processes correctly, we have become one of the most preferred logistics centers in both distant and nearby geographies.
By closely following developments in the world and interpreting needs, and with the strength of our investors, entrepreneurs and exporters who both give direction to production strategies and provide added value to the export ecosystem, we are closer than we have ever been to the goal of Türkiye taking its place among the world’s 10 largest economies. We will all take part together in building a much larger, stronger and more developed Türkiye. With the confidence that comes from having realized our dreams one by one, we are setting new targets and proving Türkiye’s strength to the whole world.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
Türkiye’s exports have increased sixfold and the number of exporters fourfold over the last 20 years. That our employment has risen by 2.7 million compared with the pre-pandemic period, in parallel with our growth and export figures, is a very great success. At a time when the whole world is making its economic manoeuvres in order to forestall an employment crisis, Türkiye is pursuing much greater targets. As our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also emphasized, our aim is to make Türkiye a main production center.
And the formula that will accelerate this process is to build awareness in investment, employment, exports and production within the framework of the Türkiye Economy Model. We are moving forward by reinforcing the sense of confidence in a stable environment. On the path we know to be right, we will make Türkiye one of the world’s main production centers with the qualified projects of our producers, investors, entrepreneurs and exporters. MÜSİAD, for its part, is assuming an active responsibility through the MÜSİAD International Organization Commission and its members in order to spread Türkiye’s production and export power throughout the world.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
It must not be forgotten that MÜSİAD is the address where Türkiye’s attraction, Anatolia’s abundance and the effort and determination of the Turkish people meet... Without compromising on the motto ‘High Morality, High Technology’, and without deviating from right and justice, we are advancing with confident and strong steps.
Our declaration of 2022 as the ‘Year of Investment’ has carried the responsibility MÜSİAD bears to a much more advanced level. Together with both our members and the stakeholders with whom we cooperate, we have an important mission in Türkiye’s attainment of its 2023 targets. In 2023, when we will mark the 100th year of our Republic, a new era of surging forward, the century of Türkiye, will begin, God willing.
Our ‘Anatolian Production and Investment Movement’, which has reached 30 cities and 50 strategic points and through which we aim to provide employment for 40 thousand people by the end of 2022, is among the most important reflections of this mission. MÜSİAD members have made investments of TRY 35 billion across Türkiye. We anticipate that this figure will reach TRY 40 billion by the end of the year.
Through our Anatolian Economy Diplomacy program, in which we bring together our entrepreneurs, investors and industrialists in Türkiye with the ambassadors of different countries, we are also leading at great speed the development of new business and investment models. We took the ambassador of the UAE to Kayseri, the ambassador of Niger to Çorum and the ambassador of Hungary to Samsun. Very soon we aim to bring the ambassadors of Japan and Switzerland together with our industrialists as well.
In line with a portion of the projects we have implemented in the international arena and the demands received, we have united our export-oriented structures under the International Investment Support Office. In this way we will bring together our industrialists with foreign institutions and organizations wishing to invest in Türkiye. We will continue to contribute to the strong tomorrows of our country with the ideal of a producing Türkiye.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
As our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has also underlined, Türkiye aims to reach USD 500 billion in exports in 2023. In this framework, MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, which we are holding at the TÜYAP Fair and Congress Center, holds a very important position in the realization of national targets. With MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, designed with an understanding of fair organization that is being reshaped in a changing world, we will establish a trade network that unites continents. We will prove Türkiye’s domestic and national production power to the whole world.
In 2020, despite the effects of the pandemic, our fair, which we organized with an understanding of safe fair management, stood out with a satisfaction rate reaching 97 percent. At MÜSİAD EXPO, which bears the distinction of being the only fair held with an understanding of safe service, we hosted visitors from 102 countries in an area of 14 thousand square meters.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
This year, following the pandemic, we have set our signature to a process of far greater added value in terms of production, export and cooperation strategies. Within the framework of MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, our teams have carried out extremely meticulous work. We have proceeded with a product- and service-oriented approach in coming together with qualified purchasing delegations. Within the framework of the commercial research we have conducted as MÜSİAD, we have formed a formula that will provide added value to the Türkiye economy. By evaluating the requests coming from our members, we will bring our business people together directly with their counterparts in different product and service categories. We will be together with visitors from 124 countries. We have participants from Europe, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa, that is, the MENA region. We will host purchasing delegations from more than 60 countries, chief among them Azerbaijan, Russia, China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran and Algeria. Within this scope, by coming together with entrepreneurs, investors, industrialists and business people from many countries, we will be instrumental in the establishment of different collaborations in both production and foreign trade processes.
We are hosting more than 100 thousand visitors in a fair area of 25 thousand square meters. With our participants and visitors from 24 different sectors, we will contribute directly to Türkiye’s attainment of the USD 500 billion export target it has set for 2023. We have full confidence that the B2B meetings to be held within the framework of MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, which we are holding with a vision that will give direction to global and regional trade, will produce positive results. Through the International Business Forum and various events to be organized within the framework of MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, positioned as the heart of commercial diplomacy, we will announce to the whole world the strength Türkiye possesses along the axis of production and exports.
At MÜSİAD EXPO, the Bayraktar TB2 UCAV, which has achieved national and international successes in the field of national defence, will meet visitors. Along with this, the Cezeri Flying Car and many different projects developed within the scope of the National Technology Initiative will also be presented for the appreciation of our guests.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
We will hold the 26th IBF Congress with the participation of valued business people, investors and entrepreneurs coming from all four corners of the world. We will show the whole world the interactive strength of the 26th IBF Congress, which will be organized with the synergy of more than 1000 business people from our international branches in Canada, Türkiye, Europe, the USA, the Middle East, North Africa and Russia, together with representatives of the other forum member partner countries. At this year’s International Business Forum we will focus on the theme of ‘Food Security and the Protection of Generations’. At MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, a D8 Ambassadors Summit will also be held this year for the first time with the participation of D8 ambassadors. Within this scope, a memorandum of understanding, an MoU signing ceremony, will also take place. Through the events we will organize within the framework of MÜSİAD EXPO, Türkiye’s most comprehensive mixed trade fair, we will bring together diplomatic missions from all four corners of the world, our overseas representatives, and the ambassadors, consuls and honorary consuls in our country with our business people.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
As the MÜSİAD Family, alongside our vision of providing added value to production and exports, we are continuing at full speed to contribute to humanitarian diplomacy with our social responsibility projects and to commercial diplomacy with our global initiatives.
We are establishing a MÜSİAD Village consisting of 600 briquette houses in the Idlib region of Syria. In the project, implemented in cooperation with the Sadakataşı Association, 450 briquette houses have been completed. When the construction work is finished, the houses built will be delivered to those in need in the region who are victims of the war. Along with this, through the Orphan Sponsorship practice we carry out with the Yetim Foundation, we are taking thousands of our children under our wing. And the cooperation between MÜSİAD Women and our Ak Yuva Foundation instils hope in our disadvantaged girls. We are also reaching those in need in Afghanistan and Syria.
While delivering Anatolia’s abundance, its compassion and our values of civilization to every corner of the world by standing shoulder to shoulder, we will also contribute to intellectual production in the commercial and economic sense through the workshops we will open and the reports we will publish. We will raise qualified people and will support our young and women entrepreneurs even more in every field. In order to raise the generations that will be the pioneers of this world in the future and that will give direction to knowledge, science, industry, investment and production, we have sown seeds with Young MÜSİAD. Thanks be to God, our number has passed 4 thousand. We will move forward with a special vision that embraces every segment of society and gives them the value they deserve.
At the MÜSİAD Visionary21 Summit, with the theme ‘Notice the Climate’, we invited the business world to an all-out struggle against the climate crisis. We believe that the 10-article Climate Manifesto we published will create a different awareness on issues such as sustainable renewable energy, the green fuel projection, the circular economy, the digitalization of energy and zero-energy production.
The food crisis triggered by climate change has not only made an agriculture- and environment-friendly understanding of economics important, it has also revealed the importance of an economy of contentment in place of a consumption economy. As MÜSİAD, we will continue to voice these issues, which concern not only our country but all of humanity, at every opportunity.
Mr. President,
Distinguished Guests,
As I conclude my remarks; at MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, which we are holding at the TÜYAP Fair and Congress Center,
I respectfully greet our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is with us today, and I extend my thanks to our global stakeholders and to the international purchasing delegations for their participation, which will pave the way for Türkiye to open up to new markets in foreign trade and in its export drive.
With MÜSİAD EXPO 2022, which will prove Türkiye’s production and export power to the whole world, we will strengthen our position in the global arena much further. With the hope of growing together and building the future together with our investors, industrialists, entrepreneurs and exporters from the 124 countries and 24 different sectors participating in MÜSİAD EXPO...
Stay well, may God protect you...
Mahmut Asmalı
President of MÜSİAD