Southeastern Turkey is set to bring together local industrialists with businesspeople and investors from the Middle East in a major summit that organizers say is expected to generate billions of dollars worth of trade volume.
The Turkish-Arab Business Summit comes as relations between Turkey and the Arab world are experiencing a major thaw after a yearslong rift. Ankara has been engaged in efforts to mend ties with several regional powers, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The intensified diplomacy is to be reflected on the business side as around 1,600 industrialists and investors, 800 from Turkey and 800 from the Arab countries, will gather for the second edition of the summit that will be held in the southeastern province of Gaziantep.
Due on June 10-12, the event will be organized by the Independent Industrialists and Businesspersons Association (MÜSIAD) in cooperation with International Business Forum (IBF) and with the support of the Trade Ministry.
"The summit, which will bring together 1,600 industrialists, entrepreneurs and investors, will provide a very important added value to the future of Turkey with innovative investment projections," Mahmut Asmalı, the head of MÜSIAD, told a launching meeting for the event in Istanbul on Friday. "In other words, we will meet the industrial representatives of the Middle East in Gaziantep."
Also addressing the meeting, the IBF President Erol Yarar stressed the importance of the summit for Turkey and for the Turkish-Arab investors, as well as the whole region.
Highlighting that the summit will also lead to a serious trade volume, Yarar stated that they foresee that it would generate more than $3 billion, although he said a much higher figure would not be a surprise.
IBF is an international platform of annual congresses and joint commercial activities bringing together 42 business associations from nearly 25 countries.
Asmalı said Turkey has cemented its spot as a logistics intersection during the pandemic with a reliable infrastructure that has enabled undisrupted momentum of supply chains.
"Based on this confidence, we will move the Turkish-Arab Business Summit from Istanbul to Gaziantep and achieve a new order shaped by regional dynamics in our export vision," he noted.
"New partnerships and commercial connections will be encouraged with bilateral talks, panels and exhibition activities to be held within the scope of the summit. We will establish closer and intensive cooperation mechanisms with our brothers and sisters from the Arab world, with which our historical and cultural ties are very deep-rooted and rich."
Throughout its history, Turkey has hosted immigrants from many regions of the world, including the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East, said Yarar.
"They have never been an obstacle for Turkey. On the contrary, together they have been a plus for Turkey. Arab businesspeople have made significant investments in Turkey," he noted.
There are more than 40,000 enterprises in Turkey run by businesspeople of Arab origin, said Yarar. "They employ over 1 million people. And they contribute billions of dollars to Turkey’s exports."
Asmalı also stressed the importance of the geography as a trade region for Turkish businesspeople.
"The fact that we share a common history and that our values overlap with those of Arab peoples, our historical, cultural and social closeness that has been going on for centuries, has also created a strong synergy in the economic dimension with different investment and cooperation projections," said Asmalı.
MÜSIAD has dubbed 2022 a year of investments and has pledged efforts and projects that will rev up production and employment in the coming period.
It has recently also kick-started an initiative titled "Anatolian Production and Investment Move," aimed at expanding export-oriented investment and production across the region.
Asmalı said the first stage of the initiative will consist of an investment of around TL 25 billion ($1.7 billion) to be made at 40 locations in more than 20 provinces in the region, where he said they look to add dynamism to the export-oriented production mechanism.
MÜSIAD has a total of 169 contact points, including 88 in Turkey and in 74 countries across 81 locations.
Known as Turkey’s gastronomy capital, Gaziantep is also a crucial city in terms of industrial infrastructure and trade due to its location, and is "one of the shining stars of Turkey," Yarar said.
"This will be a great meeting that will go down in the history of the Middle East."