Why Leveraging Turkey as a Regional Hub is Good for your Business

With the eurozone falling into recession and most of CEE following closely behind, multinationals increasingly look to Turkey as a growth engine for their EMEA business. However, growing competition on the Turkish market means that companies need to build scale into their Turkish business to maintain profitability. One strategy a growing number of multinationals are pursuing is leveraging Turkey as a regional hub. In fact, Frontier Strategy Group’s research finds that companies that based their regional hub in Turkey improve their profitability well above the global average for their company.

Why are these companies doing so well? Basing a regional hub in Turkey has two benefits: cost savings and customer access. Turkey’s geographic position as a hub, its extensive trade agreements with countries in the region, and strong infrastructural and cultural linkages to the Middle East, North Africa, Balkans and Central Asia regions, offer global multinationals access to over 1 billion potential customers.

However, Turkey’s main attraction are the cost savings companies can realize when locating a hub there. Turkey’s large and growing domestic market, with 75 million customers and a vibrant business sector, makes the country a viable alternative even to established hubs in places such as Dubai. The size of Turkey’s market is complemented by the country’s large skilled, and relatively cheap labor force that allows companies to build a sales hub, to manufacture, and even to conduct R&D activities locally. Finally, Turkey’s favorable investment climate means that companies can confidently make the large, long-term investments that are required when setting up a regional hub.

Leading global multinationals are already benefiting from the opportunity to hub in Turkey. Some companies have selected Turkey as a hub for the larger EMEA region, for example The Coca Cola Company, manages more than 90 markets from its Istanbul regional headquarters. Other companies use Turkey as a regional sub-hub managing a limited number of smaller regional markets. For example, Pepsi, Adobe, Huawei all manage 10-20 regional markets from Turkey. Illustrating this trend, global multinationals such as Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline both relocated their regional headquarters from Dubai to Turkey in the past 6 months. More companies will no doubt follow.