İKMİB Paints Sector Report: Turkish Paint Industry

The Turkish paints and coatings industry has undergone significant development over the past 10 years alongside the overall economic structure of our country.

Our sector, besides being the 6th largest paint manufacturer across Europe, is advancing toward the goal of becoming an international-scale sectoral force in its region through steadily increasing production and technological infrastructure.

Particularly across EU countries, the paints and coatings industry shows an increasingly declining trend in production and demand structure. When comparing the development level of the paints and coatings industry in these EU countries with that of Turkish paints and coatings industry, EU countries appear to operate within a fairly low and stagnant sectoral structure.

Economic Scale Exceeded USD 2.5 Billion

Our paints and coatings industry, through its advances over the past 10 years in production technology, commercial structure, and growing export capacity, is advancing toward the goal of becoming a regional production center.

By the end of 2010, the Turkish paints and coatings industry had reached an economic size of USD 2.5 billion in domestic and foreign markets. Within the global paints and coatings industry's market size of USD 90 billion and the corresponding production area of 35 million tonnes, the Turkish paints and coatings market appears to hold approximately 2 percent share of the global market.

The paints and coatings industry operates with nearly 600 establishments. Within our developing economic structure, manufacturing of important integrated products for our manufacturing industry is being carried out particularly in sub-production areas such as automotive, construction, general industrial paints, wood/furniture coatings, and others. Along with developments in these areas, the sub-production areas of our paints and coatings sector are also showing rapid growth performance.

Sectoral Exports Should Be Increased Through Freight and Logistics Support

In the integration process with the EU, we anticipate that numerous technical obstacles in paints and coatings and raw materials exports will increasingly come onto our agenda from a regulatory perspective.

Particularly with regard to REACH and chemicals compliance with the EU acquis and developments in the trade field, we will face many challenges in increasing sectoral exports. Apart from this process, we believe that the economic stagnation occurring in EU countries and the resulting insufficient demand will affect export figures in the coming years.

We believe that sectoral solutions in this field should be developed together with sectoral non-governmental organizations, particularly the State Ministry Responsible for Foreign Trade, the Undersecretariat of Treasury, and Exporters Associations. Additionally, we can state that it is necessary to increase sectoral exports particularly through freight and logistics support.

Paints and Coatings Industry Working to Increase Sectoral Exports