Retails sales rise 22 percent in February

ANKARA

Retail sales volume has increased by 21.5 percent in February from the same month of last year, data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) have shown.

This was lower than the 34 percent year-on-year increase in retail sales in January. Strong earthquakes hit several provinces in Türkiye’s south in early February, which devastated businesses and killed more than 50,000 people.

“In the regions affected by the earthquake disaster, force majeure was declared, and VAT declarations were postponed. For this reason, alternative data sources such as e-invoice and e-archive invoice data and statistical methods were used in the February calculations,” TÜİK said in a statement.

The share of estimates based on those calculations is 3.76 percent in total, the statistics authority explained.

Retail sales declined by 6.5 percent month-on-month after rising 5.7 percent in January from December 2022, TÜİK data showed.

At constant prices, food, drinks and tobacco sales grew 24.3 percent year-on-year but declined 0.3 percent on a monthly basis. The annual increase in non-food retail sales slowed from 43 percent in January to 24.5 percent in February, while non-food sales fell 8.7 percent compared with the previous month.

Textile, clothing rose 10.7 percent annually, easing from January’s 31.3 percent but the monthly decline in the sales of those items quickened from 0.2 percent to 4.5 percent.

Automotive fuel sales increased by 7.8 percent from a year ago, however, they fell nearly 9 percent from January.

The annual increase in orders via mail and the internet slowed from 41 percent to 22.5 percent in February, while the month-on-month decline was 11 percent.

Final consumption expenditures of households, which grew nearly 20 percent in 2022 from 2021, accounted for 57.5 percent of GDP last year.

In its World Economic Outlook report, released on April 11, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revised downward its GDP growth estimate for the Turkish economy for 2023 from a previous 3 percent to 2.7 percent. The fund, however, increased its growth estimate for 2024 from 3 percent to 3.6 percent.

The fund projected that consumer price inflation will decline from 50.6 percent this year to 35.2 percent in 2024.

TÜİK separately reported on April 12 that the index for combined turnover in the industry, construction, trade and services sectors grew by 68 percent in February from a year ago.