Our DEİK Family Continues the Journey of Success

Having started 37 years ago, DEİK’s journey continues without a pause through its “business diplomacy” activities aiming to increase investment and trade between countries, under its seminal vision.

As DEİK, we operate in line with our goals with our Business Councils, our fellow travellers, wherever you come across on the map from Japan to Hungary, from Malaysia to France, from Angola to Russia, from Qatar to Czechia, from the US to Bosnia, from Uzbekistan to Senegal.

We have left behind another plentiful year in which we all worked together. I can tell that it was a better, braver and more active year compared to the time we met with Covid-19. With its changing variants, Covid-19 has become a part of our lives and we are learning more and more in living together with it day by day. The year passed with ups and downs and acute fever transitions in terms of economy, but we always kept working with hope and effort. We created more added value with more investment and production, with more exports and employment.

In this context, we said, “Time for getting to work”, and we took our precautions and completed our preparations. We unpacked our suitcases and continued on our way for new cooperations. We went to our brother Azerbaijan and our neighbour Iraq for the Business Forum and to the US for the Investment Conference. We organized events in Angola, Nigeria, and Togo with our President of the Republic of Türkiye. We organized many activities from TABEF, where we hosted more than 3000 guests from 45 African countries, to TURKIC, where we hosted 450 businesspeople from 6 Turkic Republics. We conducted studies on important topics such as the Customs Union, Belt and Road, African Continental Free Trade Area. We organized more than 1500 events with our fellow travellers and 147 Business Councils spread all over the world.

We have a long way to go… Following our 2021 Elective Ordinary General Assemblies of DEİK Business Councils, we will continue to be the global horizon of our business world by maintaining our business diplomacy activities on the long road ahead as the volunteer ambassadors of the DEİK family.

Taking part in an elite platform of the Turkish business platform such as DEİK, being the President and a member of the Business Council actually means being Turkey’s business diplomacy representative in the relevant countries, and even one of its most important interlocutors.

With that said, I would like to thank our Business Council Chairpersons and Executive Boards, who have completed their duties, for their sacrifices specific to the countries they are responsible for, for each meeting, flight, cooperation, contact, and all their efforts, from the smallest to the biggest. I also wish success to our newly appointed Business Council Chairpersons.

They say “Life is a journey, not a destination.” I wish that this journey of our DEİK family will pass, as always, by working hard for our country and business world and by achieving new successes.

Before our 2021 Elective Ordinary General Assembly of DEİK Business Councils, we made our cover interview with Mehmet Muş, Ministry of Trade of the Republic of Türkiye, in this issue of our Business Diplomacy magazine, in which we included the activities of our Business Council Chairpersons for the last two years. We discussed the expectations for 2021 and 2022 in the World and Turkish Economy from a broad perspective. In addition, our valuable academicians shared their views on topics such as “Impact Investing” and “Society 5.0”.

Enjoy your reading, and stay safe.