Turkey is Europe’s largest textile manufacturing and supplying hub. Major textile brands source their clothing from Turkey. These textile exports have propelled Turkey to become the fourth largest clothing manufacturer in the world and number one in Europe.

With the removal of international trade barriers for China, the Turkish textile sector started losing its labour cost advantage and in order to maintain its competitiveness, producers moved toward new designs, fashions and quality labels, targeting higher income clients.

Huge amounts of raw cotton are available in Turkey. The country is one of the biggest in the world in terms of cotton yarn production capacity. Similarly the Turkish man-made textile sector is also well-developed with a very strong presence in all kinds of synthetic fibers and yarn production and processing.

The apparel sector constitutes nearly 30 per cent of Turkey’s net exports while textile has a share of nearly 23 per cent. Thus these two sub-sectors that are complementing each other have a share of 53 per cent in net exports. Of late, Turkey’s yarn imports from India have been sluggish and have started declining since January 2015. India’s exports of spun yarns in March 2015 were down 46 per cent year on year.