We firmly believe that the automotive industry in Turkey has a very promising and bright future and will continue to invest to maintain and strengthen our position of being an international production and R&D center for global brands.
The automotive industry is the driving force of the manufacturing industry and exports of Turkey. The automotive industry has today a production capacity of 1.75 million units thanks to the implementation of new projects and the capacity investments in the last 5 years. About 50,000 people are employed directly in the industry while the multiplier effect brings the total employment in the value chain to approximately 500,000 people. In 2015, automotive exports registered a 12% increase in terms of units exported while the value of exports in Euro rose by 14%. Our total production increased by 16% to 1.359 Million units, thus marking best ever production and exports numbers in 2015. With the 2015 production, Turkey has become the 15th biggest automotive manufacturer worldwide, while it is the 5th largest manufacturer in the EU, occupying the 1st rank for bus and commercial vehicle production, 2nd rank for truck production and 7th place for passenger cars production. The automotive industry, which exports 76% of the vehicles manufactured, is also the leading exporter in Turkey, representing 17% of the total exports of Turkey, in first half of 2016. Vehicles manufactured in Turkey are exported more than 180 countries around the world. With the investment made in recent years in production capacity, new models and R&D and engineering, Turkey’s automotive industry has become an international competence center, marking the competitiveness and quality strength of the in the global markets The R&D incentives provided by the government to help the automotive industry become an R&D center for the global automotive brands contributed fundamentally to the development of engineering capacity of the industry. R&D employment increased by 90% and the number of patent applications by 207% between 2010 and 2014. The R&D in automotive industry represents 18.9% of the total R&D expenditure in Turkey, making her the third country in automotive related R&D spent after Germany with a share of 31.7% and Japan with a share of 19.8%. We firmly believe that the automotive industry in Turkey has a very promising and bright future and will continue to invest to maintain and strengthen our position of being an international production and R&D center for global brands. With the investments being made in new models and capacity increase, we estimate that the capacity of our industry will reach 1.85 million units at the end of 2016. We foresee that the exports will exceed the threshold of 1 million and reach 1.1 million units while the total production will reach over 1.45 million in 2016.