The number of investments applying within the scope of the Technology-Oriented Industrial Move program, which was launched by the Ministry of Industry and Technology in 2019 to increase value-added production, increased to 185.
185 projects envisaging 65 billion liras of fixed investment in the fields of health and chemical products, digital transformation, mobility, structural transformation in production and machinery were accepted. The fixed investment amount, which approached USD 2 billion in July, exceeded USD 2.2 billion (TRY 65 billion) as of the first half of November.
USD 44.8 bln deficit in technology trade
Turkey is trying to direct its incentive system towards increasing the production of high-tech products that it pays high prices for imports. In the whole of last year, USD 133 billion 949 million was spent on the import of high-tech and medium-high-tech products. This amount corresponds to approximately 37 percent of the overall imports of USD 363 billion 711 million. This year, in the January-September period, imports of high and medium-high technology products amounted to USD 116 billion 210 million. On the other hand, exports of these products remained at USD 71 billion in the first 3 quarters. In other words, in the January-September period, Turkey posted a deficit of USD 44.8 billion in high-technology foreign trade.
The Ministry of Industry and Technology is calling for special incentive programs in addition to the incentive programs in force to change this composition, which has been causing a high foreign trade deficit for a long time. The most striking of these is the Technology-Oriented Industrial Move program, which started in 2019. Within the framework of the program, investments were called for incentives in 4 main categories: mobility, structural transformation in production, health and chemistry, and digital transformation.
According to data published by the Ministry, the total R&D investment regarding the program was stated as 176.7 million dollars.
