Turkey's export of medical textile goods reached $1.4 billion (TL 10 billion) in pandemic-hit 2020, the Aegean Exporters Association (EIB) said Tuesday.
Jak Eskinazi, the EIB head coordinator, said the export of textile products is recovering.
"Last year, despite the pandemic, there was only an 8% export loss in textile and raw materials, compared with 2019. In the Aegean region, goods worth $240 million were exported, an increase of 6%," he said.
Saying that there was a strong demand for the medical textile and active sportswear products during the pandemic, Eskinazi noted Turkey's technical textile exports in 2020 increased by 76%, reaching $3 billion compared with the previous year.
In technical textile products, exports from the Aegean region rose to $194 million, an increase of 98%, he said.
Additionally, in the subgroups, Turkey's medical technical textile exports saw a 22-fold increase, while the exports from the Aegean region saw a nearly 46-fold increase, reaching $92 million.
"Surgical dresses and masks have an important share in the increase of medical-technical textile exports," he added.
Turkey ranks sixth worldwide in terms of the garment and ready-wear industry exports in general while the pandemic pushed Turkish medical textile good exports to over the $1 billion threshold from January through October of last year.
