ITHIB President Ahmet Öksüz Special Interview for Garment News
Ahmet Öksüz “As Textile and Ready-to-Wear, We Are the Sectors That Provide the Most Foreign Currency Inflow”
Stating that we live in the homeland of the world textile industry, ITHIB President Ahmet Öksüz said: “Textile is integrated into all the parts of our geography and culture. Turkey’s overall exports get 1 percent share from world exports; this rate is 3.5 percent in the textile sector. As the textile and ready-to-wear industries, we are the sectors that provide the most foreign currency inflow to our country by giving a foreign trade surplus of 18 billion dollars a year.”
Garment News continues to be the voice of the industry. In our March-April issue, we interviewed with Istanbul Textile and Raw Materials Exporters’ Association President Ahmet Öksüz. Stating that both the textile and ready-to-wear sectors serve as the locomotive of the country’s exports, Öksüz said, “Despite the contraction in global trade, we aim to achieve a strong position in the global market by using our competitive advantages, market diversification, innovation and quality-oriented strategies.” Öksüz discussed the future of the textile industry in general framework and shared with us the activities and projects realized as İTHİB.
Dear Mr. Ahmet, first of all, thank you for conducting an interview with our publication Garment News. Could you tell us about the place of the textile industry in the Turkish economy?
We continue to maintain our textile sector by strengthening our success thanks to our production quality as well as our ability in export markets and our ability to adapt quickly to change. Together with the ready-to-wear sector, we are a sector that exports approximately 30 billion dollars, produces 82.5 billion dollars and employs more than 1 million people. Approximately half of our employment consists of women and 1 out of every 4 people in the manufacturing industry employment works in the textile and apparel sectors. As the textile sector, we are the fifth largest exporter in the world and the second largest supplier of the European Union.
Our textile sector closed the year 2023 with 11.6 billion dollars of exports. Although the European Union (EU) countries and the USA experienced a 20 percent decline in textile imports, we managed to maintain our market share. We maintained our 15 percent share in the EU’s textile sector imports in 2023. In 2023, the earthquake disaster we experienced had a great impact on our production and exports. While the markets came to a standstill for a while, the global economic recession was one of the main agenda items during the recovery process later in the year. In this process, with the cooperation of our government and our industry, a large part of the production in our earthquake regions, especially in Kahramanmaraş, was restarted. However, unfortunately, we could not close the year 2023 at the level we desired due to the global recession.
As you know, there is a current account deficit in Turkey. We import textiles and ready-to-wear as much as we export them. Is there a gap between these import and export figures? If so, what can we do to close it?
The textile sector realizes 82.4 billion dollars worth of production with the ready-to-wear sector. 50.2 billion dollars of this production comes from the textile sector and 32 billion dollars from the ready-to-wear sector. Turkey’s overall exports get a 1 percent share from world exports; in the textile sector, this rate is 3.5 percent. As the textile and ready-to-wear sectors, we are the sectors that provide the most foreign currency inflow to our country by giving a foreign trade surplus of 18 billion dollars a year. We have a production infrastructure that can increase our foreign trade surplus to 25 billion dollars. Therefore, while we are proud of our foreign trade surplus of 18 billion dollars, we are aware that we have the potential to bring more foreign currency to Turkey. For this reason, we continue our initiatives to protect our domestic production, employment and infrastructure on all platforms, especially the fight against unfair competition in imports. As the textile and ready-to-wear sectors, we are one of the rare countries in the world that can realize all production stages in the sector from fiber to ready-to-wear. We live in the homeland of the world textile industry. Textile is integrated into all the elements of our geography and culture. In order to carry this ancient sector forward, we must protect our sector with all its components. Because we know that without textile, there would be no ready-to-wear clothing, and without our ready-to-wear sector, there would be no textile investments and production, which are established with billions of dollars today. Therefore, we must protect all the wheels of this integrated production power.
Producers are worried about sector shrinkage. What are your recommendations for producers to cope with the crisis?
Unfortunately, the sector shrinkage will continue for a while in 2024. We have faced global demand contraction in the past years. However, with the cooperation of the private sector and our state, we have emerged stronger from all the contractions and the political and economic instability in our nearby geography. Therefore, our sector should not be worried. Textile is not a luxury but the most basic need of life like food. Therefore, textile production will never end. However, production has to evolve on a different path with R&D, design, innovation and branding. The USA, the world’s largest economy, has become the world’s largest textile machinery importer country in 2022. The textile exports of the USA amounted to 4.2 billion dollars in 2022. I would like to underline that the USA, “the world’s largest economy”, left India behind in textile sector exports and became the 2nd largest textile exporter country in the world. EU countries made 5 billion euro textile investments last year. The world does not give up on textiles; on the contrary, it invests in textiles with high R&D and innovative power and attaches importance to branding.
We also need to strengthen Turkish brands. Apart from growing in private label, we should focus on branding. While we have the ability to achieve much greater success in these areas, I believe that the apparel industry should also shift its vision a little more in this direction. Branding will positively affect not only our apparel industry, but also all our sectors from fiber to yarn, from fabric to sub-industry, and will create added value for our sectors.
As the press, we closely follow and appreciate your work. Could you tell us about ITHIB’s 2024 activities for our readers?
The textile industry is rapidly and continuously developing itself with innovative methods. Although sustainability takes the lead in this sense, of course, developments are not limited to sustainability. In our sector, where innovative approaches are gaining momentum day by day, we emphasize at every opportunity that our manufacturer exporters should focus on these areas and we are re-constructing our activities by adding these areas in addition to the traditional production approach.
At the center of our export strategy is to focus on the know-how and commercial competencies we have developed. Despite the contraction in global trade, we aim to achieve a strong position in the global market by using our competitive advantages, market diversification, innovation and quality-oriented strategies. We aim to create added value in every field covered by the textile industry with our production capability that we develop day by day by focusing on sustainability.
In this context, as İTHİB, we continue to successfully continue our Texhibition Istanbul fair, the pride of our textile industry, in March and September. Our Texhibition fair, which is the largest textile fair in Turkey, has become one of the fairs with the highest number of visitors in the world. We aim for Texhibition Istanbul to host more than 30,000 visitors this period and we are organizing buyer delegation programs within this framework. We are confident that our fair, which we have worked very intensively on the yarn and denim sections this year, will make its name mentioned much more frequently on a global scale in the coming years. While organizing Texhibition Istanbul, we never thought about profit or quantity. Our most important priority has always been quality and controlled growth. We will continue our work with the same sensitivity in the coming period.
As İTHİB, we will continue to bring our members together with international buyers with our Trade Delegations as well as organizing national participation in international fairs. In the first two months of 2024, in addition to organizing national participation in Premiere Vision Paris, Munich Fabric Start, London Textile Fair exhibitions, we organized a trade delegation to Mexico and brought 35 of our companies to meet with purchasing groups in the American continent. A total of 667 meetings were held in our delegation. In the second half of 2024, we will continue to organize trade delegations to countries such as Mexico, Chile, USA and South Korea.
In 2024, we will continue our initiatives to increase qualified employment, such as our Futuretex Istanbul Design Competition and our Preference Textile Engineering scholarship project. Because it is not possible to develop our industry without investing in human capital. In this context, we expect to continue our sustainability-oriented trainings without slowing down as we did in 2023.