Turkish industry is experiencing glorious years: in fact, as we mentioned in a previous article, Turkish manufacturers buy more and more used machinery to meet the growing demand of the industry. One area that makes the Middle East fear theTurkish is the textile production, which doesn’t seem to have experienced the crisis.
An established textile industry
Despite what the opinion might think, the secondary sector employs a quarter of the Turkish population, which corresponds to 85% of the activities in the region located between Zonguldak (Black Sea) and Gaziantep (Syrian border). Nevertheless, the country shows good figures. The success of the textile industry can be explained by the rise of private investments, close cooperation with China and an increasing demand for textiles. Therefore, the textile industry is a key sector of the Turkish economy, which corresponds to 16% of total industrial production and 19% of the profits from exports. Therefore, Turkey is the second largest supplier of textiles in Europe behind China with 7.5% of exports. Turkey mainly exports cotton and synthetics,which has allowed the production of Turkey to establish itself on the European market. However, it is recognized that the quality of textiles from Turkey is higher than that of China, which does make a difference on the European market.
Establishment of cooperation in the East
In fact, the main suppliers of Europe are countries of the Middle East. Competitors, i.e. countries such as Morocco and Tunisia encourage their firms to “cooperate” with Turkey in order not to lose the European market. Meetings were thus organized between the Maghreb countries and Turkey. This is the reason why a textile fair was opened last year in Morocco, in order to encourage the creation of partnerships. It is in this context that in 2011 a Free Trade Agreement entered into force, as between 2003 and 2010 the trade between the two countries increased from 300 million to 1.5 billion dollars. However, bilateral exchanges remain in favor of Turkey, which is better established on the European market. The development of this cooperation is still in process and is expected to grow more and more in the next coming years. The scenario is similar for Algeria, which also formulated a request in 2013 to create a free trade agreement with Turkey. But this time the agreement would be in favor of Algeria, which exports the equivalent of $ 3 billion euros of natural gas to Turkey.
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The economic climate being strangely favorable to the development of the Turkish industry, cooperation with the Maghreb countries should allow the creation of strategic partnerships in order to stay strong in front of the Asian competition.
