Doing business in Turkey

Visited: March 2006, June 2007

Duration of visit: 6 days

Capital city: Ankara

Population: 85 million (2022)

Doing business in Turkey reading time: 3 minutes

• Doing business in extremely challenging market.
• Competing against cheap Chinese copies.

I’ve had the chance to visit Turkey several times: as a backpacker, for business, and in 2022 I even drove my own car around Istanbul during a family trip through the Balkans.

In this article I describe my business trips to Turkey in 2006-07:

• Tea, cigarettes, and tough negotiations
• Selling in a market of copies

More articles about Turkey are available here:

When working for an American corporation as a sales manager for Central and Eastern Europe (2006-07), I visited Turkey on two occasions, aiming to position an HVAC brand, find local distributors and consequently push sales to higher volumes.

Turkey is an extremely challenging market, where goods from all over the world are sold through a multitude of distribution channels. During extended meetings our business partners were constantly smoking, drinking tea and complaining about high prices and fierce competition.

People display friendliness, reliability and will to cooperate, but at the end of the day, they care for their own interest and making money, putting loyalty aside.

I was not very successful in sales, because Turkey doesn’t comply with the same regulations as the European Union. Copies of branded products can be distributed without limitation at much lower price.

The quality might not be the same, but Turkish purchase power is lower and customers usually prefer more economical solutions, even though the products last less time.

Whenever I showed my local business partner a new product, he would say:

“Rok, I like it. Let’s wait six months to see if the Chinese copies appear on our market.”

And that’s exactly what happened. On my next visit to Istanbul, he took me to the big market, where we found copies of our products being sold for half the price. It was easy to see that the quality was not the same, but the majority of Turkish customers didn’t care about that.

We ended up again in a good local restaurant. We talked about politics and tourism while drinking tea, and he kept lighting one cigarette after another. In the end, we got no business done.