"Turkey needs to produce hıgh value- added products"

 Stating that there were social and economic advances for the last 12 years, the Speaker of Gaziantep Chamber of Industry (GSO)  Mustafa Topçuoğlu said that Turkey needed to produce high value-added products.

The Speaker of GSO Mustafa Topçuoğlu continued as follows: "Maybe the biggest handicap of Turkey is that Turkey is not be able to produce high value-added products. If we start from the fact that global production of economic value has been shaped within the knowledge economy, we can understand better how important to produce high value-added products. The share of Research and Development (R & D) expenses in Gross National Product (GNP) needs to be increased so that we can produce high value-added products."

Reminding that there seemed serious advances in R & D expenses of Ministry of Science and Technology especially during the last decade, Topçuoğlu said "On the other hand, development of university-industry cooperation is of great importance.  We managed this partly in Gaziantep, however this is not enough, our universities should cooperate with our industrials in all branches of industry actively. Raising the R & D and innovation awareness of students from elementary, middle, high school and universities as a significant educational attainment, and teaching the new generation this concept will absolutely make a major contribution to the business world. I completely believe that this will increase more and more in the future."

Emphasizing that high value-added production was an issue that Gaziantep should stress on, Topçuoğlu spoke as follows " Gaziantep should focus on the issue that it has some problems about high value-added production. Increasing competitive power depends on increasing high-tech export products. To be able to do that, there needs to be more focus on R & D activities and a close follow to the world exports cycle. The production of more traditional, routine, and labor intensive products affect competitive power negatively. Producing information and technology based products always have advantages in competitiveness. In this regard, For this, it has begun to be taken some steps in both Turkey and our city, but this is quite a long process."