ISTANBUL
Turkish Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan has said, "Despite three out of four markets that we export were affected by the economic crisis, our exports recorded at $152.6 billion."
"Hopefully, we will reach $160 billion of exports in 2013," he added.
Caglayan attended the opening ceremony of the 25th International Ceramic Bathroom Kitchen Fair (UNICERA) in Tuyap Fair Centre on Wednesday.
Referring to trading, Caglayan reminded the saying of "What we've done is the assurance of what we will be doing" and stressed, "People come to see Turkey's economic growth on site, that is why they come over here. At the Turkish-German CEO Forum, I was holding the presidency of Turkish side and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was holding the presidency of German side where we held meetings with 16 Turkish and 16 German investor firms. The ones who attended that meeting had a trade volume of 352 billion Euro in total and total number of their employees were 1 million."
"Our 16 firms' volume was 40 billion euros and their employment was 300,000. These people do not come to Turkey for visiting. They come to Turkey to invest more in Turkey and to cooperate more with Turkish businessmen in third world countries. We came together with German CEO's who invested in Turkey. None of them stated that they were unhappy. That is why, in the past decade nearly $124 billion of investment came into Turkey," Caglayan underlined.
