CATHIC conference focuses on Turkey’s economic promise
Yapi Kredi Bank’s Cevdet Akçay kicked off the CATHIC conference with a rousing call to Turkey’s economic and financial community to improve its communication with the rest of the World.
“Turkey has a perception problem because we are not doing a good PR job on our economy. My idol is Brazil because there are many similarities between our economies, but Brazil is doing an excellent job of managing the perceptions of their economy”.
He went on to outline how Turkey has changed and improved its economic position over the past 10 years, and how this transformation was accelerated by the Global financial crisis. Turkey now has ‘normalised’ interest rates, and brought down the real cost of borrowing, and is now a completely different country from that of 4 years ago. With these basics Turkey has immense opportunities for growth and prosperity.
“The bad rap that Turkey has had is unfair, and Turkey has not been given the credit it deserves for its economic reinvention,” Akçay said. “If Turkey can manage its economic image abroad and utilise the best brains the country has to manage the economy, then there is huge potential for the country”.
In a session on securing finance for hotel development in today’s market, Serdar Bilgili, Chairman of Bilgili Holding explained how he has created a hotel investment fund to tempt international institutional investors into the Turkish hotel sector. He believes the Turkish real estate market is one of the best in Europe, but there was not a suitable vehicle that was attractive to these institutional investors.
Bilgili outlined the difficult path to success: “After one and a half years of raising funds, we have fifty per cent of what we wanted,” because, he said, real estate institutional investors are very careful. Interestingly, Bilgili expected most of the money to come from the Middle East, but in fact most of the interest so far has come from US pension funds and University endowment funds.
(source: www.breakingtravelnews.com)
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