Importance of Qualified Financing...

• 02.08.2022
• Archive

A strong, predictable monetary policy, financial stability, qualified financing and fighting inflation... these are the topics that we address on almost every platform in the recent years as they are of utmost importance for our production life and real sector.

As Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, our views that we constantly express on the topics above, especially our view on the importance and protection of price stability and financial stability in the context of increasing investments, exports and employment in our economy have so far not changed under any conjuncture.

And our assembly of July that convened under the title of “The importance of qualified financing policies supporting the real sector in terms of production and exports” gave us the opportunity to discuss all these important matters.

We discussed all these subject matters which became even more critical for our real sector in the recent years together with the Governor of our central bank, Prof. Dr. Şahap Kavcıoğlu, the foremost addressee of the subject, under the roof of Turkey's biggest chamber of industry.

To summarize my thoughts that I shared with the central bank governor, I may say that the most vital issue for the real sector today is having access to qualified financing. The first condition to achieve this end is to maintain a strong and predictable monetary policy which is the key to ensure predictability of production in the mid- and long-term. As already set forth in all our surveys on ICI 500 and ICI Second Top 500 Industrial Enterprises, the survey conducted this year also clearly puts forward the difficulties experienced by our industrialists in accessing to qualified financing.

According to the results of the surveys, borrowing plays an increasingly predominant role in financing operational activities. I would like to underline two factors that attract attention in this context. Firstly, there is a reasonable shortening in the term of debts. Secondly, we observed that the debts of industrialists to other companies increased much more rapidly than their debts to banks in 2021.

Cutting down loans by the Turkish Eximbank at a drastic extent gave rise to the increase of unrecoverable problems in the real sector, particularly in the export-oriented production.

Departing from all the above-mentioned facts, I would like to point out once more that as industrialists, our general expectation is, first of all, ensuring normalization of the credit and financing facilities and putting an end to or flex the practices not compatible with the facts of the real sectors.

After we announced the results of ICI Top 500 survey in May, we also published the results of ICI Second Top 500 Industrial Enterprises that the economic public looked forward to. In the pages below, you may find a summary of the survey that puts forward very striking data on the conditions prevailing in the real sector and company performances.

This month I would also like to share with you very important and good news about the activities of ICI. We really broke new ground in Türkiye concerning the training system provided by our chamber for a long time under the body of ICI Academy. Our ICI academic studies have been certified by service requirement standard "ISO 29993 learning activities outside formal education”. This certification means that the quality of the training service provided by ICI Academy has been certified by an international standard. Thanks to this certificate, the importance and meaning of participation and achievement certificates granted to the participants at the end of the training program has increased.

With this good news, I wish all our industrialists to a fruitful month with peace of mind.

Erdal Bahçıvan
Istanbul Chamber of Industry
Chairman