ITO President Avdagiç: “Let us be the winners in the 18 new competition arenas worth 48 trillion dollars”

Istanbul Chamber of Commerce (ITO) President Şekib Avdagiç stated, “The 18 new competitive arenas in McKinsey’s latest report will shape the global economy. These 18 industries will generate between 29 trillion and 48 trillion dollars by 2040, and we must be on the winners’ list by making breakthroughs in them. We must not get lost in daily economic discussions but also prepare for the future.”

In a written statement, ITO President Şekib Avdagiç noted that global waves of change are coming that will deeply affect the business world and all sectors. He pointed out that many industries that are valid today will not be among tomorrow’s competitive arenas, and emphasized the need to open up more to ‘unique’ industry categories with high growth and dynamism. Avdagiç highlighted that this is a necessity, stating, “This is the meaning of being a country that not only produces consumer goods but also thinks about the future and produces technological investment goods today.”

Avdagiç indicated that sectors such as e-commerce, electric vehicles, cloud services, and semiconductors continue to progress. He remarked, “Artificial intelligence, digital advertisements, and streaming video are technologies undergoing transformation. For example, artificial intelligence has emerged from software and made its presence known. There are also completely new emerging processes. Leading these are shared autonomous vehicles, space, cybersecurity, battery technologies, video games, robotics, biotechnology, modular construction, nuclear fusion, air mobility, and obesity drugs. These 18 new competitive arenas in McKinsey Global Institute’s (MGI) latest report will shape the global economy. We must be the winners by making breakthroughs in these 18 industries, which will generate between 29 trillion and 48 trillion dollars by 2040. According to McKinsey, there is a profit of 2-6 trillion dollars in these 18 areas by 2040. The share of these technologies in the collective national income will rise from 4% to 10-16%. Therefore, these categories are our primary and most important targets,” he evaluated.

“We must focus on technologies that increase economic profit with technology”
Avdagiç stated that we need to start working now to transform the next 10 years into a period where Turkey will develop with high technology.

Stating that transforming our industries in the Turkish Century is no longer a choice but a necessity, Avdagiç added: “We must focus on technologies that increase economic profit with technology, appeal to the world, and require more R&D investments. Let us not forget that among the world’s largest 20 companies in 2005, as of September 2024, only 4 remained in the top 20. We must work now to ensure that Turkish firms take the place of those that will drop out of the list in the next 20 years. In 2005, there was no iPhone, no one spoke of cloud storage, and electric cars seemed like they had come out of science fiction films. Today, these are already in our lives, and these firms are the biggest companies in the world. In the future, we will be as successful as the number of companies regularly appearing on the Fortune 500 list. We can only enter and advance in the Turkish Century by writing our name on the Time100 AI list.”

According to TÜİK data, Turkey’s high-tech product exports in the first 9 months of the year reached 6.1 billion dollars. Avdagiç noted that its share in total manufacturing industry exports was 3.4%, stating, “We have a great opportunity for global transformation ahead of us to increase the technology intensity in our exports. Waves of change are coming that will deeply affect our business world and all sectors. Let us not miss the new competitive arenas of 48 trillion dollars in the world.”