BRANCH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

23 MARCH 2021

ŞANLIURFA

Honourable District Governor,

Honourable Mayors,

Esteemed Members of our Board of Directors,

Distinguished Chairmen and Representatives of the Business and Political World, of Non-Governmental Organizations and of our Chambers, Distinguished President and Members of our MÜSİAD Şanlıurfa Branch,

Esteemed Members of the Press,

Welcome to the General Assembly of our Şanlıurfa Branch; I respectfully greet you all. Distinguished Guests,

Today we are in Şanlıurfa, the apple of the eye of the Southeastern region and the Land of the Prophets. While Urfa stands out in the region with its historical and cultural treasures, its cuisine and its people, it has also succeeded in carrying its fame beyond the borders of the country.

Göbeklitepe, which is referred to as “the zero point of history” and is the oldest known temple in the world, has a large share in this fame.

Our regional business people and we ourselves are working with all our might so that the city may use these legacies and all the values it possesses in the best possible way, advance in every field and above all in tourism, and make a greater contribution to the national economy.

As is known, energy, tourism and livestock also hold an important place in the economy of Şanlıurfa, which is predominantly based on agriculture. The share of the textile and food sectors within total manufacturing industry is high.

Şanlıurfa alone possesses a significant portion of the total irrigable fertile land in Türkiye. Moreover, Şanlıurfa, which is the ninth largest city of Türkiye in terms of population, draws attention with the weight of its young population.

With its historical and natural beauties, Şanlıurfa succeeded as of 2018 in surpassing the figure of one million tourists per year.

Ranking 47th among the provinces of Türkiye with the highest exports in 2020, the city succeeded in raising its exports by %1 to USD 133.1 million in this period, in which exports contracted across the country.

In this period Şanlıurfa exported goods and services to a total of 102 countries; the first three places were taken by Iraq, Syria and Algeria.

Given that approximately %55 of the province’s total exports go to these 3 countries, we must state that Şanlıurfa absolutely needs to expand its export market for a more solidly grounded and sustainable foreign trade.

Dear Friends,

Speaking of export markets and production, at precisely this point I would like to emphasize that the real balance for the solution of the financial problems we have been experiencing in recent days lies hidden in production, in investment and in trade. As we have said on every platform and time and again, real economic elements cannot be managed with financial instruments; they can only be given a cosmetic touch for a while.

Phenomena such as inflation, employment, the current account balance and growth fall within the scope of the real economy, and they are again solved and brought into balance through real economic planning and instruments. Operating the three fundamental markets, that is, the capital, raw material and labour markets, in such a way that they feed and consolidate one another ensures that we remain within a sustainable development and that even our growth rates move at a predictable equilibrium far from volatility.

It is then that the contribution which direct foreign investments, rather than hot money, will make to our country will both develop the elements of national capital and enable Turkish companies to have a far stronger structure in the face of crises.

Look, we have witnessed the financial fluctuations we have been experiencing in recent days before as well. We have encountered serious exchange rate increases before too. What is essential here is not to panic in the face of a shock and to wait calmly for the fluctuation to pass. The loss of value of the Turkish lira, which began last night in the shallow Asian markets and rose to the level of 8.80, worried savers in our country and, most importantly, the segment engaged in production and trade. However, the fact that we began the morning with a much lower exchange rate level gave us some measure of relief.

Both our country’s economic administration, and directly the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye, and the institutions and organizations of the banking system are taking

the necessary measures so that this volatile course in foreign exchange is overcome with the least possible damage. The duty falling to us here is not to turn expectation effects negative by giving way to an atmosphere of panic.

Esteemed Guests,

Having left behind a very difficult and thorny 2020, I suppose no one here has thought that 2021 would not carry forward the inventory of the previous year and that everything would be put right as if nothing had happened. Of course all the problems inherited from 2020, that is, the volatility in commodity prices, the increase in food prices, the ongoing epidemic whose third wave is feared to be coming, the borders likely to close again because of the epidemic, states that turn in on themselves and are ready to save their own unitary economic structures even at the cost of severing their ties with the outside world, the social and psychological fatigue the epidemic has created all over the world, the unemployment steadily rising throughout the world… All of these will continue in 2021 and afterwards as well. As long as the pandemic continues, the economic crisis arising from the pandemic will continue too, and in some countries it will even intensify further.

Although we attribute this economic crisis affecting the world to the Pandemic, in fact the world economy was already under strain before the pandemic, particularly to the detriment of the Developed countries. Production was shifting to the East, and dependence on China had made the world captive to a single centre, from raw materials to logistics, from supply networks to production bases. Likewise, the growth rates of the Developed 20 had been on a downward trend since 2016. With their ageing populations, since they could not find a new generation to which they could hand over their SMEs and larger companies, most companies with a high brand value were either being transferred to the state or closing down. In other words, even if there had been no pandemic, we would have seen this bomb with its pin pulled in 2020. In many of my press statements and in the reports we prepared, we voiced this approaching train that had come off the rails. We insistently said that measures had to be taken and that the essential thing was to act with real economic elements. I suppose you remember.

Today, both in our country and in many countries of the world, the state’s areas of intervention are steadily widening because of income injustice, capital lost in the middle-income trap and rising prices of goods and services. Despite this, it is also possible to say that global world capital is once again flowing from the developed countries towards developing countries such as ours. However, the important point here is not that this flow of capital should come in and go out with the logic of instantaneous fund movements;

it is that it should provide production, investment and employment in our country through direct investments. And realizing this is once again in our own hands.

Esteemed Friends,

As of yesterday we saw a very serious foreign outflow from the Turkish capital market, particularly in the bond segment. Yet if, alongside fund movements, we set ourselves the goal of turning Türkiye into an investment market for foreign capital by improving our country’s investment climate, we would thereby also secure a lasting accumulation of capital.

It is precisely for this reason that one of the reasons why, from the day I took office until today, I have visited the provinces one by one instead of sitting at the headquarters is to see and identify on the spot the capacity and the resource efficiency in each of our cities. My esteemed MÜSİAD brothers and sisters, you are the soldiers who shoulder this country’s system of production, trade and investment and who make MÜSİAD Türkiye’s most widespread capital platform. Because one thing has now become essential: the execution of industrialization, that is, the forming of suitable industrial policies, is possible only by correctly identifying the resource potentials of our cities and by making contact with the enterprises that will make them operational in the field, in order to learn their needs.

Seeing that, in the Economic Reform Package announced last week by our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the programmes for the transition to domestic and national production planning, particularly for national industrialization and the reduction of dependency on imports, have taken the form of state policies gives us hope. Because I have believed the same thing for years: in a country, the power of money is determined by that country’s power of production and investment.

Dear Friends,

The pandemic process is not a period that will end just like that. Even if the epidemic ends, its effects will live on together with us. We must now follow the new models of development and growth, that is, the new business development models of the new world order. We made a statement; we said that in the future it is not states but cities that will compete. For this reason the formation of regional and urban economies, that is, of city economies, is essential. 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 proper identification of their potentials and the increase of the provinces’ values through investments suited to these potentials,

turned into a project through the data I obtained as a result of these travels of mine and the experience brought by being in direct contact with you. Every city has its own distinctive values. Turning these into high value-added assets brands that city and increases its contribution to GDP. The basic starting point of this study was to compare our cities, using certain criteria, with the cities in the world that have similar characteristics and are their counterparts, and to apply in our own cities the methods and processes of the added value produced by the examples in the world.

We gave this study the name “Developing Cities through Their Distinctive Values”. That is, determining criteria for valuing their own assets by comparing them with their counterparts in the world, and city matching. At this point, the most important of the comparison criteria is the corporate strength that city possesses. Determining a correct industrialization policy in fact means finding, supporting, enlarging the scale of and increasing the capital strength of promising companies that will keep this economy standing in order to form city economies, and carrying out the domestic-national production drive in such a way as both to brand the cities and to strengthen the companies. I call this putting city economies to work for the execution of industrialization.

Esteemed Guests,

Although the global economy, which contracted sharply in 2020, is projected to recover relatively in 2021, forecast uncertainty remains high depending on the course of the epidemic. Our country, for its part, is among the leading countries that have come through this difficult process with the least, only slight, damage. As is known, the Turkish economy, which grew by %5.9 in the last quarter of 2020, was the country that recorded the highest growth among the G20 countries in this period after China. Growing by %1.8 over 2020 as a whole, the Turkish economy displayed a performance that surprised all the international institutions which had made contraction forecasts for it at the beginning of the year.

We think that the process which will begin with the implementation of the Economic Reform Package will increase the revival of both the services and the production sectors, and that this will be reflected positively in our national income in 2021. However, the determining factor here is again the course of the pandemic and the effectiveness of vaccination work. For, in the event that we face a third wave, in order to compensate for the possible loss of capital that we would experience again, we must, just as China did, continue production without pause in certain

regions and take steps to increase our stocks.

And this of course comes through the logic of establishing secure production bases every stage of which has been thought through. In this model, whose details I will touch upon shortly, our basic aim is to develop the strategy China pursued under our country’s conditions with even more advanced conditions and with a logic that gives priority to people and nature.

Whatever anyone may say, it is clear that in the light of the recently announced growth data we have displayed a serious performance of resilience. We are the children of a nation that knows how to stand upright in every situation, that is courageous and that has submitted to God without losing heart. We come through every condition by His leave and grace, so be it. Perhaps that is why we are courageous:

Even in 2020, a year that passed with considerable economic hardship, we did not stand idle and we held one of Türkiye’s most important fairs.

We held MÜSİAD EXPO 2020, the largest fair held after the pandemic, which drew intense interest from both exhibitors and visitors, with broad participation and completed it successfully. Close to 15 thousand visitors from 102 countries, chiefly from Europe, Asia-Pacific, Eurasia, Africa and the MENA countries, attended the four-day fair. At the fair, which we held under the slogan “Global Trade Is Here”, we hosted 400 purchasing delegations from 50 countries. EXPO 2020, which we held at the İstanbul TÜYAP Fair and Congress Centre and which was attended by business people, politicians and academics from every region of the world, enabled our business people to open up to new collaborations while also giving foreign investors the opportunity to examine the investment opportunities in our country at first hand.

Distinguished Guests,

We support our fellow travellers with 89 points in Türkiye and 225 contact points in 95 countries around the world. And now we are launching a brand-new restructuring movement in order to unite them with a strong trade and investment network.

With the employment of 2 million people that it provides, we have brought this valuable structure, which works harder every day in order to be of benefit to the Turkish economy and to our nation, to this point together with each one of our members. We do this with our institutional culture, our accumulated knowledge and the strength we draw from our organization.

By processing the information we obtain through you from domestic and international regions, we are building an important database. As a result of this, we present the business world with a picture that sets out all the risks, opportunities and current problems.

As you know, we launched our Renewal process in order to prepare in advance for the new world system. Our motto at the outset was “Together”.

We have fulfilled almost all the initiatives we planned and promised within the framework of our Renewal process. Now we are reaping the fruits of this process with our large-scale projects.

Look, it is no coincidence: read once more now the names of our committees in our Renewal process, which we launched two years ago by analysing these days very well and by drawing up a genuinely strategic road map. You will see how the line drawn in 2018 designed a path running all the way to 2023-2030. We set out this vision years ago, before anyone else saw it.

We said the New Routes and Approaches in Logistics Committee. Look, now it is logistics companies and the new routes they draw that give direction to world trade. We said the Domestic and National Production Planning Committee; look, now domestic and national production planning has become the basic starting point of unitary economic structures. We said the Energy and Mining Management and Investments Committee; today an entirely different field of economic sharing is taking shape in the name of energy security and new mineral deposits. We said the Industrial Zones and Campuses Committee; look, today establishing production bases has become an indispensable field of investment all over the world. We said the Smart Cities and City Economies Committee; after us it became a policy at Presidency level and was written into the 11th Development Plan. Indeed, the projects launched at EU level for the matching of cities showed how right and far-sighted we were on this issue. There are many more examples: Gastro-economy, Rural development, Mergers and acquisitions, Export Matching…

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

To this end, our total of 23 committees under the roof of the MÜSİAD ASSEMBLY, which we established during the Renewal process, have begun, with projects suited to their own thematic or sectoral fields, to gather the potential investors and industrialists in Anatolia around certain projects.

These projects have begun to encourage the capital strength in Anatolia to invest in projects or to become a partner in them.

For example, with our Investment and Production Bases Project we have formed a model that, by building living and production zones in which all their needs will be met in the same environment for our small-scale companies which struggle to produce in narrow spaces and therefore cannot reach scale, will in time turn them into institutionalized companies ready to move into organized industrial zones. We have completed the first prototype of this model, and we are also beginning the construction of the second one shortly.. In order to enter among the world’s top ten economies, and for the epidemics and disasters likely to recur under any conditions, we have to establish production bases. By establishing production bases, it becomes possible to protect companies, employees and production in situations of epidemic or severe disaster and to keep them going without a full lockdown.

We have briefly given this model the name SME INCUBATION CENTRES. This model, in which all the needs of SMEs, from education to accommodation, from social activities to artistic settings, are met within the same living space, aims to create a safe production and living space both for our workers and for our producers and their families.

This project of ours has also been one of our undertakings planned from the centre and transferred towards Anatolia. At the same time, this project of ours was registered as a project under state auspices by the Presidency of Strategy and Budget within the scope of the Coordination Council for the Improvement of the Investment Environment.

In the same way, with our Smart Agricultural Cities Project we have 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 as a model to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

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

Today many of our members in Anatolia are carrying out preparatory work in order to implement this initiative in their own regions.

Many more projects of ours like these have been produced by our committees and spread to the grassroots. Branding cities in the field of Gastro-Tourism through gastro-economy and Turkish Culinary Arts, establishing structures such as Caravan Tourism and Field Hospitals through multiple partnerships, forming a safe purchasing platform in the second-hand vehicle market, forming a safe real estate purchase and sale platform, and, in line with the 2023 targets, growing selected

SMEs in 20 places and 23 locations and turning them into Türkiye and World Brands. This and many other projects like it have become the fruits of MÜSİAD’s Renewal adventure.

We have created the MÜSİAD Brand in 6 basic fields in line with Türkiye’s 6 basic strategies: MÜSİAD INNOVA ( MÜSİAD YENİLİK) in order to adapt to the conditions of innovation management and digital transformation.

MÜSİAD FUTURE (MÜSİAD GELECEK) in order to develop the strategic sectors and business models of the future,

MÜSİAD ACADEMY in order to turn education into a MÜSİAD school of thought and to give it an institutional identity.

2023 YER-EL (20 YER 23 EL), which covers the work directed at our Anatolian companies with a view to producing World Brands out of Türkiye by increasing branding and the brand values of companies and to turning our SMEs into large-scale corporate brands; MÜSİAD INVEST (MÜSİAD YATIRIM) in order to turn the reliability advantage of the MÜSİAD Brand in Türkiye’s investment strategies, its field presence and savings kept under the mattress into mass investments and partnerships and to establish the systematic framework of investment funds,

MÜSİAD TIA (MÜSİAD TİCARET ve YATIRIM AJANSLARI), 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 operate MÜSİAD’s overseas field presence like a trade and investment system. As many of you have witnessed, we are continuing our work without interruption and we will continue to do so. We will go on developing projects and serving our country, our nation and the lands where we were born.

As MÜSİAD, while upholding the ideals of our founders and these goals of ours, we are on the other hand also continuing the MÜSİAD tradition.

Our Qard al-Hasan Fund, one of the finest practices of this tradition, is a balm for wounds thanks to the goodwill of our members, and it enables us to strengthen the culture of brotherhood and to pass it on to new generations.

Our Qard al-Hasan Fund project, which we brought to life out of the desire to continue an ancient tradition, has institutionalized the culture of mutual aid and solidarity among our members by turning it into an institutional structure, which we formed with the thought of facilitating the trade of our merchants, and has institutionalized the culture of mutual aid and solidarity.

On the other hand, we are also continuing the practice of the “Zimem Ledger”, another of our ancient traditions, with the support and contributions of all our branch members, chiefly the head office.

Dear Friends,

MÜSİAD is a family, a home, a school. Here we all walk with the pride of being soldiers of the same consciousness and the same cause, and when the time comes we hand the flag over to the brothers and sisters who come after us. This rule is ancient for everyone. This is what makes MÜSİAD distinctive. For this purpose, being present at the General Assembly of our branch makes me exceedingly happy. As I complete my remarks here, I hope that the MÜSİAD Şanlıurfa General Assembly will bring good things and that our branch’s contributions to our business world will continue to increase.

I wish success to our branch president, to the board of directors, to the MÜSİAD Women’s Committee and to our Young MÜSİAD brothers and sisters. I thank our MÜSİAD Local High Board Chairman Ahmet Bey and our local relations committee, as well as our production and trade high board chairman Oktay Bey, our professional staff and everyone who has contributed.

I greet you all with respect and affection.

Abdurrahman Kaan

President of MÜSİAD