Ford Automotive becomes Turkey’s export champion, surpassing oil refinery

Ford Automotive made over $3.8 billion in exports in 2015, the Turkish Exporters’ Assembly (TİM) announced in a written statement on May 24. The company was followed by Tüpraş, another Koç company, with around $2.9 billion in exports and Oyak Renault at around $2.7 billion.

“Some 48.7 percent of Turkey’s exports were made by the top 500 exporters, and 8.8 percent by the second top 500. The remaining 42.5 percent of total exports were made by 62,000 other companies in 2015. We saw the exports spread more along the bottom this past year,” said TİM President Mehmet Büyükekşi. 

The top three exporters were followed by Kibar Foreign Trade Co at over $2.4 billion, Vestel at over $2.1 billion, Tofaş at over $2 billion, Arçelik at around $1.7 billion, Toyota Automotive at around $1.2 billion, Bosch Turkey at around $1.1 billion and TGS Foreign Trade at around $1 billion, according to TİM’s data. 

Four Koç companies placed in the top 10: Ford Automotive, Tüpraş, Tofaş and Arçelik.


10 companies post over $1 bln

“A total of 10 companies saw over $1 billion in exports in 2015. We want to see at least 50 companies surpass this amount by 2023. A total of 14 companies also made exports worth between $500 million and $1 billion, and 121 companies between $100 million-$500 million in 2015,” he said. 

Büyükekşi said the profitability of the top 500 exporters rose to 5.38 percent in 2015 from 4.94 percent the previous year. 

“It is also good to see that the average profitability of the second top 500 was at 9.71 percent. In 2015, especially companies which made exports to the eurozone faced problems due to the parity effect. If these problems had not been the case, we could have talked about 7-8 percent profitability levels in the top 500 as well,” he added. 

According to TİM data, the first 500 companies increased the number of their workers from 709 in 2014 to 932 in 2015. The number of workers hired by the second top 500 was 417 on average last year – a figure that was largely unchanged from the past year.

A total of 593 companies from the 1,000 largest exporters were based in the Marmara region, followed by the Aegean region with 138 companies and the Central Anatolia with 83 companies. 

The largest amount of investments was made by Tofaş in 2015 at $1.3 billion, followed by Tüpraş at $1.2 billion, Bosch Turkey at $744 million, Ford Automotive at $466 million and Arçelik at $277 million, according to TİM’s data.