Adil Pelister, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Istanbul Chemicals and Products Exporters’ Association (İKMİB), made a written assessment of Turkey’s growth data for the first quarter of 2021, which was announced by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK).
Pelister said in his assessment “The Turkish economy made a strong and positive start to the year with a growth of 7 percent in the first quarter of 2021. Our country, showed a growth success that exceeded expectations in the first quarter, is expected to complete the year with a positive growth of around 5 percent. Both the leading indicators and the export data, which broke historical records, gave us a positive sign for growth. We see that the contribution of net exports to growth is 1.1 percentage points. In addition, while the industrial sector grew by 11.7 percent in the first quarter, the growth in the manufacturing industry sector was 12.2 percent. Our chemical industry, providing raw materials and semi-finished products to 27 sectors, shows a strong performance both in production and export. The capacity utilization rate of the chemical industry was 75.35 percent in the first quarter, slightly higher than the general manufacturing industry capacity utilization rate.
Our chemical industry, which is Turkey’s second largest exporting industry, grew by 14 percent in the first quarter, with exports of $5.31 billion. We see from the record export figure of $2.16 billion in April that our industry will maintain this momentum in the second quarter as well. With the recovery in our export markets and the increase in demand and the acceleration of vaccination in our country, we hope to be able to maintain these good results consistently. On the other hand, since the chemical industry is 70% foreign-dependent in terms of raw materials, we need priority investments such as petrochemicals to be made in our country as soon as possible. Giving priority to domestic and national production, switching to high value-added product production and expanding the scale of our companies are of great importance for the future of our industry. Our exporting companies may need additional capital due to the high raw material prices. Therefore, we believe that support should be provided to our companies such as facilitating access to finance with appropriate loan interests, postponing loan payments and debts, extending or postponing the GEKAP declaration period. We will continue to produce and increase our exports by working harder in the post-pandemic period”.