Turkey’s ability to produce warships domestically based on the work of local engineers is a major motivation for the entire shipbuilding industry, head of the Union of Boat and Yacht Exporters (GYİB) Başaran Bayrak has said.
Bayrak said if Turkey’s military ships had been ordered abroad, the cost of buying the ships would have been four times the current spending on them. He stated that a total of EUR 4 billion has been saved under MİLGEM, the Turkish national warship project.
He said the Turkish Navy has been ordering the vessels its fleet needs only at Turkish yards for a while, based on a past decision to support local shipbuilding. Bayrak said that the amount of local content in the building of these ships could be as high as 60 and even 70 percent in most cases; a situation which he noted has been a major development for the industry.
“We have delivered a large number of ships to the Turkish Navy. They have registered these ships in their inventory. The total value of the Navy’s orders was around EUR 3.5 million. If these ships had been ordered abroad, the cost would have been twice this amount. Our shipbuilding industry has saved at least EUR 4 billion to our country. We have achieved an incredible level of dynamism in the industry. Our ship share also greatly appreciated internationally. We will all see that in the near future, Turkey will become an exporter of warships. We have good data to support this. We hope that we will see the results of this project very soon.”
Turkey among top ten warship makers
Bayrak said the country had no standing in international military shipbuilding rankings ten years earlier. “We are now one of the 8 or 10 countries in the world that build military ships.” He further noted: “Shipbuilding is a very specific and complicated industry. Of course, we need to import some of the equipment for weapons, but that is the case for most countries. Say, the missile system installed on a US warship might be from another country. The weapons industry is an industry on its own. All of the ships we have built for the Turkish Navy are designed domestically. This makes us really proud, we have great hopes for the future.”
4,000 people employed as part of MİLGEM
Before the 2008 economic crisis, the shipbuilding industry employed as many as 100,000 people including employment occurring through subcontractors, adding that direct employment accounted for 30,000 of this number. During the crisis, this figure went down to 8,000 Bayrak said. “There was a recovery after 2012. We were able to bring direct employment numbers to around 14,000 people. It is not easy creating jobs at shipyards. 4,000 additional people were employed during the production of these warships. We believe that this figure will increase as our capacity increases.”
