ANKARA: Turkey’s trade deficit rose 17.2 percent year-on-year to $6.15 billion in March, according to Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) data released on Thursday.
The median forecast for the March trade gap was of $6.24 billion March exports fell by 14.4 percent to $12.6 billion and imports fell by 6.1 percent to $18.7 billion. According to the data prepared by TurkStat in cooperation with the Ministry of Customs and Trade, exports decreased by 14.46 percent to $12.57 billion year-on-year in March, while imports registered a decrease of 6.1 percent to reach $18.72 billion in the same period. The export-import coverage ratio fell to 67.1 percent in March from 73.7 percent in March 2014. Thursday’s data also revealed that seasonally and calendar adjusted exports had decreased by 5.6 percent, while imports in March fell by 3.5 percent compared to the previous month.
Considering the annual change in trade figures with the calendar and seasonally adjusted data, exports decreased by 14.4 percent in March and imports fell by 8.8 percent in the same period. There was also a decline in exports to European Union countries as a proportion of all of Turkey’s export partners. EU-bound Turkish exports fell 11.8 percent to $5.34 billion in March year-on-year. The share of EU countries, however, showed a slight increase in March and reached 42.5 percent from 41.2 percent. The report by Turkstat also found that Turkey’s leading export partner in March was Germany with $1.08 billion in exports, the UK with $1.03 billion, Iraq with $745 million and the UAE with $597 million. Meanwhile, Turkey’s biggest purchases abroad were from China at $2.34 billion, Russia at $2.19 billion, Germany at $1.81 billion and Italy at $960 million.
The rate of manufacturing industry products as a proportion of total exports was recorded as 94 percent. Of the total products exported by Turkey from the manufacturing sector, the rate of high-technology products was 3.7 percent, while that of medium-high-technology was 30.6 percent in March, the data showed. The rate of manufacturing industry products as a proportion of total imports was 78.8 percent. While the ratio of high-technology products to total manufacturing products was 13.5 percent in March, the rate of medium-high-technology products in manufacturing industry products was 44.6 percent.
Meanwhile, TurkStat said on Thursday that separate data revealed that Turkey’s tourism revenue rose 1.3 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, to $4.87 billion from the same period in 2014. The number of foreign visitors to Turkey rose 2.37 percent year-on-year in March to 1.9 million people, data from the Tourism Ministry showed on Monday.
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