ANKARA: Ministry of Customs and Trade said exports, based on provisional data, dropped by 15.4 percent year-on-year and stood at $11.1 billion in July.
Turkish exports shrank by 13 percent in July compared to the same month a year ago, a written statement released by the Turkish Exporters Assembly (TİM) on Saturday revealed.
TİM’s statement indicated that exports dropped by 13 percent year-on-year in July and stood at $10.9 billion, adding to losses in the first half of the year.
Compared to the first seven months of 2014, the contraction reached 8.8 percent in the same period this year, pushing down the aggregate export volume from $92.5 billion to $84.3 billion between January and July. Exports totaled $148.5 billion for the last 12 months, a 4.9 percent decrease from the previous period.
In his accompanying remarks, TİM Chairman Mehmet Büyükekşi pointed to a decrease in global commodity prices, downward movement in euro-dollar parity and shrinkage in world imports as the main forces underlying the contraction in Turkish exports.
Even though the volume of Turkish exports, on a unit basis, increased both in July and in the first seven months of the year, total revenue on exports failed to rise accordingly primarily due to declining commodity prices in the world, which is also a result of unfavorable euro-dollar parity, Büyükekşi stated.
Around 45 percent of Turkish exports are paid for in euros, and Turkish exporters pay the cost of intermediary goods mostly in US dollars. The euro has lost as much as 18 percent of its value against the dollar over the last 12 months, weakening the purchasing power of parties paying in euros. Büyükekşi said Turkish exporters’ parity losses had already reached $7 billion in the first seven months of the year.
Meanwhile, global imports dropped by 13.8 percent year-on-year in the first half of the year, Büyükekşi went on to say, adding that Turkey’s top export partners including Germany, France and Italy posted around a 15 percent decrease in their total import volumes in the first five months according to recent data.
The top three export sectors of Turkey in June were the automotive, textile, and chemical industries with revenues of $1.64 billion, $1.5 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively.
Turkey’s gold exports, in the meantime, surged by 145 percent in the first six months of this year compared to the same period a year ago, recent Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) data have shown.
The gold exports of Turkey between January and June amounted to $5.5 billion. The volume of gold exports, meanwhile, increased by 121 percent and rose from 64 tons to 141.7 tons. The top two export partners of Turkey in the gold trade were Switzerland and the UK in the first half of the year.
While the country imported only $1.2 billion worth of gold in the same period, top import partners were the United Arab Emirates and Germany.
