ANKARA: Gold bars bound for Switzerland boosted Turkish exports in April, helping it reduce the gap in its foreign trade by over 30 percent.
Turkey’s trade deficit fell to $4.97 billion, compared with $7.29 billion a year earlier, state statistics office said in a statement posted on its website on Friday. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 11 economists called for a $4.8 billion gap.
Gold exports rose more than 27-fold to $1.43 billion, supporting exports that inched up 0.2 percent to $13.39 billion, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on official data. Around 80 percent of gold shipments went to Switzerland with the United Arab Emirates accounting for a majority of the rest. Imports fell 11.1 percent during the same period to $18.36 billion.
Despite having no significant gold deposits, exports of the precious metal have been driving an improvement in Turkey’s trade gap which narrowed 18 percent during the first four months of the year to $20.19 billion. A gold importer for 28 of the last 30 years, Turkey became an exporter in 2012 when it started paying for Iranian gas in precious metals as a way of circumventing international sanctions that may soon be lifted.
“If we take away gold exports then we don’t see a real improvement in the trade balance number,” Yeliz Karabulut, deputy general manager of Alan Securities, said. “We can say that gold save the trade balance data.”
The lira weakened after the trade data and was trading 0.4 percent lower at 2.6663 per dollar at 12:00 p.m. in Istanbul.
