MÜSİAD Kars OPENING PROGRAM

02 September 2021

Honourable Governor,

Honourable Members of Parliament

Honourable Provincial Chairman of the Ak Party,

Esteemed Kars Business World,

Distinguished Presidents and Representatives of Political Parties, Chambers, Commodity Exchanges and NGOs,

My Esteemed Members of the MÜSİAD Board of Directors, our High Board Chairman,

Esteemed President and Members of our Kars Representative Office,

Esteemed Members of the Press,

Ladies and Gentlemen

I respectfully greet you all here in Kars, where we are gathered on the occasion of the opening of the new service building of our Representative Office; welcome, you have honoured us with your presence.

Distinguished Guests, Esteemed Friends,

MÜSİAD is a capital platform of a rare kind, the most effective and widespread in the field, spanning Türkiye and indeed the whole world. With this quality it has penetrated our country's capillary vessels, both economically and socially, and it advances with the strength that comes from mastering even the finest field knowledge.

During my term of office I have visited 80 of our provinces and 7 of our large districts. Last week we opened our Hakkari Yüksekova representative office. And yesterday it was our lot to open Iğdır. Today we are opening the new service building of our Kars representative office.

With its ever-growing presence in the field, MÜSİAD is a capital ambassador, an investment agency and a commercial and economic diplomacy institution of our country both at home and abroad, and indeed, when it comes to interstate relations, a voluntary platform in preparing the diplomatic environment for multilateral economic and commercial relations.

It is not only our widespread presence; with the renewal process we underwent 2.5 years ago, that is, in order to adapt to our changing state-government system, MÜSİAD — with its committees and their projects, which address the fundamental strategic elements of the new world order and which undertake work that will increase new Türkiye's role as a voice in the geopolitical atlas of the world — is now a superstructure element under whose single roof capital of every scale is gathered.

MÜSİAD is a capital platform that is the pioneer of domestic and national industry in our country, that gives priority to the formation of the national capital stock, and that indeed builds it.

That the strategic goals we designed and voiced 2.5 years ago, and the elements we subsequently made concrete one by one through the names of our committees, appear before us in today's world as a series of global goals, makes us proud in terms of the breadth of our foresight, our command of strategic thinking, and the scale of the services we will render and are rendering to our state.

Indeed, in this respect, we have always underlined that, within the framework of the two slogans we determined from the day we took office, we are and will be in the service of our state and by the side of our nation. The first of these was the motto “TOGETHER”.

Whatever we do, whatever we produce, whatever we must stand up to, we said together for this country. And we said that we are ready to walk together with everyone whose cause is Türkiye.

Our second motto was “WE ARE HERE”. In the same way, we said that we are here always and in every field our country needs — from science to art, from industry to education, from employment to the growth of SME enterprises, from institutionalization to project development.

It is an institution that, not only in the economic field, does not forget high morality, virtue, the Akhi culture, and aid to those in difficulty such as Qard al-Hasan and the zimem ledger. During the lockdown periods when the pandemic was experienced most intensely, it also demonstrated in the field, through its aid, that it stood by the business world and by our low-income citizens.

Distinguished Guests,

In 2020 many countries were shaken economically and socially because of the pandemic. Our country, however, drew a successful recovery curve after the initial shock; and today we are successfully sustaining that curve.

These days, praise be to God, thanks both to the increasing effect of vaccination and to the effective policies our state has implemented in pandemic management, the normalization conditions we have entered are finally bringing us together once again. The full normalization we entered in July will be reflected positively both in our economic life and in our social peace — and when we look at the growth figures, we see that it has indeed been reflected.

We grew by %7 in the first quarter of 2021, and in the second quarter we achieved growth at a rate of %23.

During and after the pandemic a new world economic system developed, and new living conditions emerged with the effect of global climate change and drought as well. This new situation showed us realities that we may summarize as being able to fend for oneself and to be self-sufficient.

In this respect, as Türkiye we must now focus on developing appropriate strategies and roadmaps in order to take our rightful share of the trade and investment environment that has developed following the process which began with the pandemic.

As in every difficult period, in this process too we as business people must focus on new investments and on increasing our trade potential in order to contribute to our country's recovery process.

As MÜSİAD, we know that our contribution to this effort is great, thanks to our organizational network which we have expanded with great care, and to the strong trade network and commercial relations our branches and representative offices have established in their regions.

With the hope that the branch whose opening we are holding here today will also engage in productive work that contributes to its region and to our country, I wish that it brings good things to our country.

Esteemed Guests, Distinguished Friends,

We made a statement: in the future it will not be states but cities that compete. For this reason, forming regional and urban economies, that is, city economies, is essential. Thus 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 correct identification of their potential and the increase of the value of the provinces through investments suited to that potential — is an extremely important matter.

On our travels, in which we tour every point of Türkiye, we obtain a number of data. With these data and with the experience that comes from being in direct contact with you, we created a project, and the matching of cities became the fundamental starting point of this project of ours.

We named this work “Developing and Branding Cities with Their Own Unique Values”.

It works by determining a correct industrialization policy; by finding, supporting, enlarging the scale of and increasing the capital strength of promising companies that will sustain this economy in order to form city economies; and, with the domestic-national production drive, both branding the cities and strengthening the companies. We may summarize this system as putting city economies to work for the execution of industrialization.

We observe that in Iğdır, whose economy is based on agriculture and livestock, the industry and tourism sectors have not developed sufficiently. In Iğdır, which has broad highland pastures, livestock breeding stands out as the most important source of income. Nevertheless, in 2020, when exports declined across the country, Iğdır increased its export volume by %10 compared with the previous year, raising it from USD 71.4 million to USD 78.6 million, and managed to record a foreign trade surplus. When we look at the foreign trade data for the first 6 months of 2021, we see that a clear acceleration has been recorded compared with the previous year. Increasing its exports by approximately %24 in January-June compared with the same period of the previous year, Iğdır reached the level of USD 44.1 million.

For our province of Iğdır, which according to GDP calculations has a size of USD 1.2 billion, the brand city we have determined is the city of Luzern in Switzerland. Of Luzern, which has a GDP of USD 23 billion,

  • The most important source of income in the region is agriculture, and most of the land is used for agriculture. The most important agricultural and livestock products are fruit growing and cattle breeding.
  • In industry, the focus is on textiles, machinery, wood, tobacco and metallurgical products. With its character as a gateway opening onto holiday resorts, its tourism has also developed
  • There is no obstacle whatsoever before Iğdır growing in this way, provided that its existing potential is used correctly. As MÜSİAD, I would also like to state that we have begun, as of today, the duty that falls to us on this matter.
  • With our Smart Agricultural Cities Project, one of our other projects, we have launched an initiative in order to encourage rural development and, in this way, to support reverse migration and attain a homogeneous population structure.

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

Next week we will share with our members of the press the provinces in which Smart Agricultural cities are planned to be established, and our report on the second century of the Republic and on agriculture and livestock after 2023. Our goal is to bring our country to the position of making USD 100 billion of exports in food and agriculture in 2030.

Distinguished Friends,

Finally, I pray for God's mercy upon our brothers and sisters who lost their lives in the disasters that recently occurred at more than one point in our country, I offer my condolences to their relatives, and I wish a swift recovery to our injured. May my Lord grant that these disasters, which burn our hearts, come to an end as soon as possible. As MÜSİAD, from the very first day we have been reaching the regions damaged by the fires and floods and supporting the people of the region through our branches. And until these difficult days are overcome, we will always continue to do whatever we can.

As I conclude my remarks with these feelings, I wish that the representative office we have opened may be auspicious, and I wish success to our representative office president Ziya Yiğit Bey and to his board of directors. I thank everyone who contributed to this organization, above all our MÜSİAD Local High Board Chairman Ahmet Bey, our representative office president Ziya Bey and his board of directors, and our professional staff, and I greet you all with respect and affection.

Abdurrahman KAAN

President of MÜSİAD