Turkish executives to lobby globally: CocaCola CEO

İZMİR - Anatolia News Agency

Coca-Cola chief executive officer addresses Aegean businessmen in İzmir.

The number of Turkish executives managing global companies will jump in the next 15 years, Coca Cola chairman and chief executive Muhtar Kent predicted April 3, at a meeting in the western province of İzmir.

Turkish lobbying activities will also develop with an increasing number of senior executives in the world, he said at the 64th Aegean Meeting, organized by the Aegean Young Businessman Association.

“Maybe I have cleared the way for this today. It’s a great happiness for me ... I have become chief executive of a large global company. Dozens of companies’ senior executives will be Turkish in 15 years.
Because Turks have a great entrepreneurship soul, experience in crisis management and fast decision making, and a tradition of risk taking and faithful management,” he said.

The World Turkish Businessman Congress, which Kent he co-founded with Rona Yırcalı, a Turkish industrialist, and Rifat Hisarcıklıoğlu, the head of the Union of the Chamber and Commodity Exchanges, is a good start for Turkish lobbying power in the world, he said.

Referring to the impressive economic growth rate of 8.5 percent last year, Kent said: “Turkey will be in the top five to seven countries in terms of growth rate. But the plans and projects that lift income per capita from $5,000 to $10,000, will not work for increasing them to $20,000 from $10,000.”

Kent also said he believed Turkey’s income per capita would rise to $20,000 in the next five or six years.