We Must Evaluate Opportunities For Cooperation With Massachusetts

Massachusetts’s economy mostly consists of high-technology and added value products/services

Turkey and the US’s, military, and cultural relations go way back… And our cooperation extends over a large area. However, we cannot say the same thing for our economic partnership. Our trade volume with the US is $21 billion, and we want to increase it up to $100 billion mutually. TAIK and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) came together to determine the opportunity areas and prioritized sectors in the country. And TAIK formed a state-based structure in the US to carry these priorities to the field.

Massachusetts and six other states were chosen. Based on the BCG study, we started to grow our work volume in the sectors that stood out and to strengthen our relations with the Turkish society, American business world, and opinion leaders in these states. Many companies who conduct R&D activities and can put new products quickly into the markets in fields such as healthcare, life sciences, eco-technologies, green energy, financial technologies, artificial intelligence applications, cyber-security, maritime industry, and education are based in Massachusetts. We believe that the cooperation between the US entrepreneurs and Turkish institutions in the region will contribute greatly to the development of producing high-technology and value-adding products. There are also many Turkish people living in the New England area, which also includes Massachusetts. I am sure our businesspeople, academicians, researchers, and students here will contribute to achieving our goals. We now conduct our communication through video conferences. We plan to increase the interaction among trade delegations when we start to recover from the pandemic. Especially with additional tariffs on China, Turkish exporters in the East Coast of the US as well will have new opportunities.

Chairperson of TAİK Massachusetts State Committee, and CEO at Eczacıbaşı Group Atalay M. Gümrah