Selami İleri, Secretary General of The Turkish Association of Agricultural Machinery & Equipment Manufacturers, said that Turkish agricultural machinery industry, which exceeded the 1 billion USD threshold for the first time in 2019, rose to the 16th place in the world ranking,
İleri said, “Despite everything, still achieved an export level of 1 billion USD. Moreover, according to the data of the first 3 quarters, the UK, USA, Belgium, Finland experienced contractions reaching 20 percent in exports.”
“It is gratifying that we are the country that survived the year 2020 with the least loss after Spain and Germany in the top 20 and ranked 16th in the ranking,” İleri noted.
“As of the current situation, the top 10 countries where most exports are made are the USA, Italy, Sudan, Iraq, S. Africa, Serbia, Australia, Ukraine, Portugal and Algeria in tractor and Iraq, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Russia, Algeria, Ukraine, Sudan, Iran, Bulgaria and Georgia in equipment. The share of the top 10 countries in the segments from exports is 83 percent in tractor and 58 percent in equipment,” İleri .
Stating that the new type of coronavirus epidemic has naturally affected sectoral exports negatively, İleri added, “In this context, our tractor industry, which has a much more complex technology compared to other agricultural machinery, differs slightly in terms of its structure and legislation to which it is subject and production method. Therefore it is much more dependent on imported input and sub-industry. So this segment has been most affected by the negative effects of the epidemic on exports.”
“In the first months of the epidemic, which has been effective all over the world since February, there were fluctuations in foreign demands and orders were suspended for a while. In this framework, our exports, which declined in the March-April period in tractors, recovered from the May-June period and started to rise again. However, as a result of the problems experienced in foreign markets for the aforementioned periods and the supply could not meet the demand sufficiently, tractor exports could not even reach the level of last year,” İleri explained.
“According to the raw data announced by Turkish Exporters’ Assembly (TIM) -with the equipment dominating the total agricultural machinery exports- our industry has survived the epidemic year with very little loss, reaching the level of USD 1,020 million in exports with a 2 percent decrease,” İleri concluded…