Turkey fails to channel money into industry: TUSKON

KIRŞEHİR

TUSKON Chairman Rızanur Meral adresses businessmen in Kırşehir.

Turkey has failed to convert hot money flow into industry to generate high value-added goods, the head of a Turkish organization representing businesspeople and industrialists has said.

“A large amount of hot money came to Turkey, along with other developing countries, but Turkey could not use this money to invest into industry,” said Rızanur Meral, chairman of the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists (TUSKON).

“We have mostly used the money in finance, construction, land opportunities and stock exchange,” he said while delivering a speech at a conference in the Central Anatolian province of Kırşehir on March 22.

“We made ourselves swim in the prosperity of money, but we weren’t able to make the transformation to the high technology products our industry needs,” stated the top representative of the business organization, known to have close ties with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen.

Only around 3.4 to 4 percent of Turkey’s production is high technology goods, whereas almost 32 percent of exports from Germany are high technology products and 21 percent from the U.S. and South Korea, Meral stressed.

“We are under pressure from countries producing low technology goods with low energy and labor costs as long because we cannot maintain this transformation,” he stated, asserting this hinders Turkey from raising its exports to its desired level.