ICI 500, Expansion and Our Industry

• 26.06.2018
• Archive

There are two significant sources of pride in this year. First, we are celebrating the 50th Anniversary of “Türkiye’s Top 500 Industrial Enterprises” survey of ICI. We, proudly, announced the results of ICI 500 that had witnessed half a century since 1968 as a rare example not just in Türkiye but also in the world. Second, I want to mention that we are very proud of moving the announcement calender of this precious survey to the month of May for the first time.

ICI 500 x-rays the industry and reveals how its anatomy had changed within a year. Within this scope, I find beneficial to touch upon the general performance of our industry sector within the economy in 2017 briefly.

I would like to start with the growth relationship of Turkish economy and manufacturing industry, and underline the importance of returning to production culture that we keep on mentioning. In fact, when you look at the breakdown of the 7.4 in 2017 percent growth, you see that the greatest contribution to this growth comes from our industry. That expansion and export effect in 2017 had been reflected to the performance of the manufacturing industry positively, too.

That's why, we, the industrialists, keep on saying that 'we should never compare production, industry with any other sector'. We should never forget that the best friend of a passionate country like Türkiye that has ideals and a population of 80 million is the industry in these challenging and tough days. Our industry has a crucial role in Türkiye’s reaching the big targets and ideals. However, our industry’s gaining more speed in our economy, in our dreams and in our prosperity thanks to the high-layered, technological products is only possible by focusing on the technology further.

The incidents in exchange and interests causing perturbation together with the instability starting especially in the financial markets since April. It should be taken into consideration that our muscles which are necessary to maintain the industry-aided growth by 7,4% in the first quarter of 2018 with the same speed for the rest of the year are not strong enough. Thus, we saw this fact in the figures of ICI PMI coming successively in the months covering the second quarter of the year.

Although the industrialist haven’t had any hesitation in investment devisions until today, process of the fluctuation in the financial stability will be determiner on the direction of these decisions as of today.

We believe that Türkiye will reach to qualified and sustainable growth environment by ending the financial instability environment to which we are getting into by taking the main measures as soon as possible.

Erdal Bahçıvan
Istanbul Chamber of Industry
Chairman