Our President Ramazan Kaya attended the Garment Sub-Industry Sector Report Launch Meeting organized by the Istanbul Chamber of Industry (ISO) on May 14, 2024 and touched upon the following issues in his speech.

“We have discussed the same issues over and over again for the last year and a half, and I am now quite tired of this situation. Especially in the last month, we have exchanged information about the status and future of our sector in many meetings, primarily at the presidential level. However, even though our difficulties seem to have eased after the process that started with the pandemic, the recession and the global economic downturn we encountered affected us greatly. We experienced a decline of up to 10 percent and 18 percent in terms of units in the first four months of this year. This situation brought us back to 2019 levels. The investments we made during the pandemic period have become a great burden for us today. However, as the world changed, consumer trends also began to change. The interest rate increases experienced on a global scale negatively affected consumers' shopping habits. When we examine the countries we compete with today, we see that we have difficulty maintaining our competitive structure in terms of both labor force and costs. Last year, the ready-made clothing sector contracted by up to 50 percent in the EU, our largest exporter. If we do not enter a transformation process, we will shrink even more. "We have become one of the sectors that have declared the most bankruptcies in the first four months of this year, and this is a serious concern. When we look at employment, we see that while 1,350,000 people were working in our sector 15 months ago, today this number has decreased to 1 million. However, I believe that with the transformation we will realize, we can win these people back and solve all other problems," he said.