MÜSİAD TRABZON GENERAL ASSEMBLY
29 July 2021
Honourable Member of Parliament,
Esteemed Presidents and Representatives of the Trabzon Business World, of the Chambers, the Commodity Exchange and Civil Society Organizations,
Esteemed Members of the MÜSİAD Board of Directors,
Our Branch Presidents Who Have Come from the Neighbouring Provinces and from Abroad,
(Rize, Gümüşhane, Bayburt, Tbilisi, Batumi, the Founding President of Munich, the former President of the USA)
The former presidents of our Trabzon Branch,
The Esteemed President and Members of our Trabzon Branch,
My Brothers and Sisters from Young MÜSİAD,
With the happiness of coming together with you on the occasion of our branch’s general assembly, I respectfully greet you all; welcome.
Distinguished Guests,
While struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic that began in 2020, we also tried to adapt to the new habits that entered our lives in this process.
Because of the restrictions and measures implemented in the name of bringing the pandemic under control, for a long time we could not come together with you, we could not talk face to face, and we had to hold our meetings online.
With normalization, thank God, we are holding our general assemblies together with you, our esteemed friends, and making up for the longing we have felt.
In order to set foot in every point of our homeland and to touch more people, we are visiting many of our cities. On Monday we were in Batumi, on Tuesday in Artvin, yesterday we were in Rize; and today we are in Trabzon, the beautiful city of the Black Sea and my own homeland.
As you know, thanks to its location and its hinterland, Trabzon has succeeded in creating an important trade culture in our country.
Thanks to its culture of trade and seafaring, Trabzon, an important market and transit trade centre for the cities of Anatolia, stands out as an important commercial centre where merchants from every region have carried out their commercial activities and have been able to establish connections with distant regions.
Of course, the Port of Trabzon, which has been an important trade base since the 19th century, has a great influence in this.
Although its total exports decreased by 8.5 percent in 2020 compared with the previous year with the impact of the epidemic, we see that Trabzon, which managed to be our country’s 16th largest exporting province, has for many years never fallen below the limit of USD 1 billion in exports.
The province’s total exports, which rose as high as USD 1.6 billion in 2015, stood at the level of USD 1.1 billion in 2020.
Provincial exports, which recorded an increase of 7.3 percent in the first six months of 2021 compared with the same period of the previous year, indicate that in this period Trabzon has come one step closer to its potential in foreign trade.
Of course, at this point we must state that the provincial economy, which is based on agriculture, needs to be diversified and that greater effort must be shown particularly at the point of non-agricultural manufacturing. The fact that 66 percent of Trabzon’s total exports consists of Hazelnuts and Hazelnut Products also confirms this necessity.
We believe that the industrial sector, which we see as being highly open to development across the province, can in the near future turn Trabzon into an important manufacturing centre.
Esteemed Friends,
In the course of the past month we came together with economy editors in order to explain our country’s investment strategies suited to the new world order and our project of developing and branding cities with their unique values. Our project met with a fine response both from members of the press and among the public.
As you know, Türkiye has in recent years been going through a period in which it has partly struggled, especially on the subject of direct foreign investment. In line with the commercial and economic activity that opened up after the pandemic, investments shifted towards the developing countries. The developed countries could not take the share they wanted from this pie.
Our country, on the other hand, although it is in the upper ranks of the class of developing countries and has favourable conditions at the point of investment, could not attract the direct foreign investment it wanted.
Foreign investments made in Türkiye In the final months of this year, unfortunately, we see from the low figures that investors’ interest in our country has declined.
Distinguished Guests, My Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Countries striving to eliminate the effects of the pandemic process, which has continued for more than a year, are carrying out intensive work in the name of recovering economically and, of course, socially.
On the other hand, 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 brand-new rules.
Therefore we now have 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 correctly, channelled to the right places, and that investors are reached and guided. In addition to 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 with a new investment network that is spread to every part of the world, that draws investment, production and trade knowledge from every point, that knows investment environments and that establishes the system that will bring investors together with the firms in Türkiye.
We state 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 conversion of their existing assets into value, that is, the identification of their potential and the increasing 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 matching cities became the basic starting point of this project of ours. We gave this work the name “Developing and Branding Cities with Their Unique Values”.
Determining a correct industrialization policy comes about by finding, supporting, increasing the scale and increasing the capital strength of promising firms that will keep this economy standing in order to create city economies, and, with the domestic and national production drive, both branding the cities and strengthening the firms. I call this making city economies work in order to carry out industrialization.
In this context Trabzon’s GDP is USD 6.1 billion. • While the economy of the province of Trabzon is based on agriculture, %75 of the active population makes its living from agriculture, livestock breeding, fishing, hunting and forestry. The main agricultural products are hazelnuts, tea, potatoes and maize. Those employed in the fields of trade, industry, handicrafts, transport, construction and other services make up %35 of the population. While industry across the province has been developing rapidly in recent years, it is seen as a province that is a candidate to become an industrial centre in the near future.
The brand city we have determined for Trabzon is Liverpool, one of the leading trade and industrial cities of the United Kingdom.
In Liverpool, one of the largest cities of the United Kingdom, because it has historically been home to one of the world’s most important trade ports, the administrative buildings of maritime transport companies, insurance companies, banks and large companies have been built.
The enormous seafront congress and exhibition centre, together with the strong growth in business tourism in the city, forms the foundation of the economy.
In addition to these, its hosting of a football stadium, a cruise terminal, offices, hotels and entertainment venues is of vital importance in the growth of the city.
It is also seen that in the recent period the Banking, Finance and Insurance sectors in particular have been the fastest-growing areas of the regional economy.
We believe that Liverpool, which is able to produce an economic value of USD 36.8 billion with a population of only 1.2 million, constitutes an important precedent for Trabzon, and that Trabzon too amply possesses this potential.
Distinguished Guests,
We also see our project for the development of city economies as a road map in Türkiye’s process of determining a new investment policy.
The only capital organization that can support the realization in Türkiye of this work, 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 wide presence can conduct commercial and economic diplomacy and investment diplomacy between the world and Türkiye most effectively, is again MÜSİAD.
The primary duty that falls to us must first of all be a change of mentality. That is, to handle investment not as merely inviting the companies in certain countries to come here as partners, but as promoting Türkiye as an investment market. And it must be to grow soundly the SME elements that are the locomotive of domestic production and, with the advantages of economies of scale, bring them together with foreign partners and fund owners, that is, to match them in a sense.
The MÜSİAD TIA (MÜSİAD TRADE AND INVESTMENT AGENCIES) system, which we designed together with the Presidency Investment Office in order to promote Türkiye as an investment and trade market for the direct foreign investor and to run MÜSİAD’s wide presence abroad like a trade and investment system, will serve this purpose and will thereby both operate investment diplomacy and attract the active investment diaspora abroad to our country.
Dear Friends,
As MÜSİAD, we launched our renewal process in order to prepare in advance for the new world system, and we set out with the motto “together”. To the period that comes after us we leave the word VARIZ — “WE ARE HERE”.
For Türkiye, in production, in trade, in investment, in every field of society from art to culture, in mutual aid, for the development and prosperity of our country, we always say “we are here”.
Particularly after the renewal process, MÜSİAD is taking its place among the world’s leading organizations by arranging its own structure in the face of the new world order and by developing a distinctive management-organization model.
My teammates and I have fought this struggle throughout our term of office in the name of reaching something better; we have no doubt that the brothers and sisters who will come after us will take over this cause and this relay of the flag in the same consciousness and with the same motto and will carry it on.
As MÜSİAD, we are developing projects aimed at increasing the contribution made to the country’s economy and at improving the culture of partnership among our members.
Our committees have begun to gather the potential investors and industrialists in Anatolia around specific projects with projects suited to their own thematic or sectoral fields.
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 have created a model that will, by building living and production zones where all their needs will be met in the same environment, turn our small-scale firms — which struggle to produce in confined spaces and therefore cannot reach economies of scale — into institutionalized firms ready in time to move into Organized Industrial Zones (OSB). 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 have launched an initiative in the name of encouraging rural development and in this way supporting reverse migration and achieving a homogeneous population structure.
Many more projects like these have been produced by our committees and spread to the grassroots.
I believe that you, with this integration process of ours in the branches, will be instrumental in carrying our MÜSİAD much further forward, God willing.
Distinguished Guests, Esteemed Friends,
In 2020 all countries experienced a deep shock in economic and social terms because of the pandemic.
Of course Türkiye too had its share of this shock; but unlike many countries, after the first shock it drew a successful graph of recovery.
We recovered gradually, and this situation was reflected in our capacity utilization rates. Our manufacturing industry, for its part, settled into a notable course of development in the last two quarters.
Here I would like to underline one issue in particular:
As Türkiye we must certainly eliminate at the earliest possible time the two basic factors that force inflationary pressure.
The first is to be self-sufficient. That is, to carry out domestically the production of the close to USD 175 billion worth of intermediate goods that are imported, to minimize external dependency and, of course, to give up seeing money as an instrument of commodity.
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 the money they keep in interest or in profit-sharing accounts.
Establishing venture capital funds through which projects will be securitized and, through these funds, reinforcing the culture of partnership and thereby encouraging production in Türkiye must again be a matter with which we must certainly concern ourselves.
We may evaluate this growth of %7 in the first quarter as the herald of the exit from the pandemic. Indeed, with the base effect we may even see the growth rate in the second quarter above %15.
But the sustainability of this situation comes about through achieving investment-production-trade synchronization and putting production forward as the basic economic policy.
Considering the inflationary environment we are currently in and the high credit costs, Türkiye still appears as a risky area of investment .
Distinguished Guests, My MÜSİAD Brothers and Sisters
In a short while, in the coming days, I will hand over my duty as President of MÜSİAD to my brother Mahmut Asmalı at the general assembly.I wish him and his new administration success. It is my greatest hope that during this four-year term of duty I have not disappointed your trust and have carried out the tasks that fell to me.
Throughout my term of office I strove to be a president who did not sit at the Head Office but travelled, taking the pulse of the business world and of the field.
Contact with our members, consultation and conversation with them, the constant hosting of the branches in Anatolia at the Head Office and thereby raising the closeness between the centre and the FIELD to the highest level, became my basic aim.
We state at every opportunity: MÜSİAD is a school, it is a home. And we are marathon runners. I believe that the 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 forgive me for any shortcomings.
As I complete my speech with these feelings, I hope that our branch’s general assembly will be a means of good things; I thank our Branch president Ali Kaan Bey, who is handing over the duty, for the work they have done, and I wish success to our brother Zafer Ofluoğlu, who will take over the duty, and to his board of directors.
I pray to Almighty God that our branch’s contributions, through its work, to the Trabzon business world, to the Black Sea region and to our country will continue to increase.
I thank everyone who has contributed to this organization and greet you with respect and affection. May God protect you.
Abdurrahman KAAN
President of MÜSİAD