ISTANBUL: Turkey’s plastics industry, one of Europe’s largest for plastic product manufacturing, has had a difficult two years, as it’s absorbed global economic uncertainty and the spillover from wars and instability in neighboring Syria and Iraq.
The country’s industry grew quickly for much of the last decade, averaging 10 percent a year, but since 2014 growth has slowed sharply and industry officials are projecting between 1.5 and 3 percent growth in final 2015 figures. That would put the industry at about 8.3 billion to 8.4 billion pounds of plastic processed.
That decade-long track record of expansion has gotten Turkey more attention from the global industry, and that interest has remained through the downturn. But executives are clearly watching the current situation closely, judging from interviews at the PlastEurasia show in Istanbul in early December. At the moment, business planning in Turkey seems to require a high degree of comfort with uncertainty.
