Turkey's exports up 23.4% since beginning of 2011

Turkish state minister for foreign trade said on Thursday that Turkey's exports were up 23.4% since the beginning of 2011, Anadolu News Agency reported.

Zafer Caglayan said Turkey earned 25 billion USD from its exports between January 1 and March 15, 2011, with a 23.4 percent rise over the same period of 2010.

"This indicates that we can easily surpass our export target of 127 billion USD in our medium-term program," Caglayan told a press conference after his two-day visit to Moscow, Russia.

Caglayan said Turkey's exports in the first half of March totalled 5.3 billion USD, which indicated a year-on-year rise of 23.1%.

Talking about his visit to Russia, Caglayan said Russia was the number one country where Turkey had undertaken the highest number of construction projects with 33.7 billion USD.

Caglayan said Turkey's exports to Russia were 6.5 billion USD in 2008 but they declined to 3 billion USD in 2009 due to global economic crisis.

"This figure rose to 4.7 billion USD in 2010," the minister said.

Caglayan said Turkey and Russia aimed to raise their trade volume to 100 billion USD in five years, and defined Russia as a target market. Turkey and Russia were trying to solve customs and logistics problems, he also said.

Caglayan said representatives of 97 Turkish and almost 300 Russian companies held talks the previous day, and discussed construction materials, food, machinery, textile issues.

The minister said he believed significant business deals would come out of those meetings.

Caglayan said Turkey's exports to Russia almost reached 1 billion USD and its imports were around 2 billion USD in the first two months of 2011.

Also commenting on turmoil in Libya, Caglayan said Turkish companies had just given a break there and would do more business in Libya when they returned back to that country when things normalized.


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