Technical Textile Exports Reached 3 Billion Dollars in 2020
Jak Eskinazi, Chairman of the Board of Aegean Textile and Raw Materials Exporters Association
Jak Eskinazi, Chairman of the Board of Aegean Textile and Raw Materials Exporters Association, provided a written statement about technical textile exports.
According to the statement, the total exports of the textile and ready-to-wear sectors exceeded the automotive sector’s exports between January and August 2020, thus achieving the highest exporting sector in Turkey.
As of December 2020, exports of textiles and related raw materials in Turkey increased by 29 percent, while achieving an increase of 67 percent by December 2020, thus reaching the highest export figure for the last 10 years. When the whole year assessed, despite the unfavorable developments in Turkey, there was only an 8 percent loss of exports compared to the same period in the previous year.
During the devastating pandemic period, while masks and protective clothing shortages were experienced all over the world, Turkey, which had a strong infrastructure in the nonwovens field used in masks and protective medical clothing, satisfied the needs in the aforementioned health care products, which intensely demanded, while supplying personal protective equipment to the world.
Turkey’s technical textile exports increased by 76 percent in the January-December period reaching an amount of 3 billion US Dollars in 2020, increased by 98 percent, and rose to 194 million US Dollars in the technical textile exports of the Aegean Region. When the subcategories are examined, we observe that the highest increase occurred in medical technical textile products due to the effects of the pandemic period.
The medical technical textile exports totaled 1.4 billion US Dollars in general in Turkey with an increase of 2204%. The medical and technical textile exports of the Aegean Region increased by 4582% and reached 92 million US Dollars. We see that especially surgical overalls and masks have the main share in the increase in medical technical textile exports.
Eskinazi continued his statement as follows: ‘‘While our technical textile exports and our infrastructure endeavors on this subject increased, the importance of the Technical Textiles Research and Application Center, which we established in 2014 and whose primary fields of work are technical textiles related to protective, medical, and sportswear, has also increased in this period. The intersection of TEKSMER’s priority areas with the prominent product groups during the pandemic period has provided our region an advantage for technical textile production and export and will continue to do so.
In May 2021, we will organize a virtual sectoral trade delegation organization for the Spanish market in partnership with the Aegean Ready-to-Wear and Apparel Exporters Association and Uludağ Textile Exporters Association, and we started to work on this.
In this period, we observed that the short-term orders and instant demands of global brands have increased. We believe that this will develop the habit of shopping from nearby markets and will contribute significantly to our exports to Europe, which is the main market for our industry.
In addition, it is necessary to mention the important contribution of our sector to employment. We aim to bring qualified Textile Engineers to the sector and studies on this issue are continuing through a very important social project carried out by our sector in this field. It is seen that we achieved a remarkable result in the first year of the project with the department selection figures in 2019, the occupancy rate in the department quotas reached 92%. 94 students who preferred Textile Engineering were awarded scholarships in the first year of the project.
This year, the quotas in 9 of the 14 Textile Engineering departments were filled and the success rank of the students who preferred increased this year as well. 74 students who chose Textile Engineering this year were awarded scholarships.’’
