THE MESSAGE OF THE PRESIDENT

As Uludağ Textile Exporters Association, UTİB, we continued to promote Turkish textile all around the world while contributing to the brand perception of Turkey, despite the controversial and highly turbulent situation in world politics and hence, trade in 2019.

We have come a long way in turning crises into opportunities by focusing on R&D and P&D projects, design contests, trade delegation organizations, and many international fairs and events without shrinking globally.

We will continue to amplify the works we carry out to consolidate the power of the Turkish textile industry in the world and to open up to new markets in 2020. Thereby we aim to increase our exports, which was 1.2 billion dollars last year, to 1.6 billion dollars this year. In actualising our goal, we trustfully rely on high value-added products and original designs that we have developed in almost every field, ranging from apparel fabrics to home textiles, from,technical textiles to denim. The number of exporting companies on textiles and raw materials rose to over 11,800 in 2019 while there were around 10,700 exporting companies in 2017. On a country bases, the total of our exports to the European Union countries constitutes 55% of the exports to all countries. We will unremittingly maintain our efforts to raise Turkey’s world’s market share, the world’s 6th largest and EU’s 2nd largest supplier of textiles and raw materials, from 3.5% to 5% in the medium term.

“Sustainability, innovation and transformation”

“Sustainability” stood at the focal point of all the projects, competitions, and events we carried out during 2019. Considering that global purchasing groups, especially the EU countries, emphasize that they will not accept any products and projects that do not contain sustainability in the next five years, especially in the field of textile and apparel, it is gladsomely reliving to know that we are on the right track. In this context, we will pursue to highlight the theme of sustainability and innovation in all our activities that to be carried out from fairs to seminars, to design competitions and trade delegations.

By bringing together new entrepreneurs and designers via TechXtile Start-Up Challenge, that we have organized with new technologies and methods in textiles, to make it applicable to the industry and to increase the alue-added exports; we blazed the trail for newcomers in bringing sustainable projects that are feasible, salable, scalable, technologically innovative and profound into production processes. To amplify our competitiveness, we should focus on the most efficient, eco-friendly and value-added productions. For this reason, we provide entrepreneurship and innovation trainings to project owners, besides mentorship. We also intend to bring them together with potential customers, to incorporate them, and to maximize the entrepreneurs that stand out over time with incubation and alternative backings.

“We Diversify the Market in a Balanced Way”

As the textile industry, we determine the target markets in the best way possible, and we continue our activities in this direction with products and services that meet the demands. The balanced expanison of Turkish textile exports to different countries prevents our industry from being at risk in crises that may occur regionally. Turkish industry has been successfully implementing market diversification in the recent periods.

With our sectoral trade delegation organization we recently organized in Mexico, we had the opportunity to showcase the design power and product quality of Turkish textiles in North America. America has always been the central focus of UTIB since 2012. We held more than 20 national participation organizations in Premiere Vision New York, La Textile Show, and Texworld USA fairs. In 2020, we will pursue our presence in new fairs that will be held in the USA. Thanks to our membership in the California Fashion Association, we will play a role in the effective promotion of Turkish industry by collaborating with Union management.

We plan out to be positioned in new markets through the trade delegations that we have increased in number.