26.04.2024 Ankara
Organized by the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Türkiye (TOBB) Türkiye Creative Industries Council, Türkiye's first “Creative Economy Summit”, which will last for 2 days, started at TOBB Twin Towers. TOBB President M. Rifat Hisarcıklıoğlu said that the summit will enable the sector to announce public supports more effectively and to develop potential collaborations.
Pointing out that the
input of creative industries is innovation and the output is intellectual
property rights, Hisarcıklıoğlu stated that rapidly developing technology and
artificial intelligence have started to offer important opportunities to the
sector.
Hisarcıklıoğlu said
that it is also important for the state to support the potential in the sector
and added: “Especially in the TV series and cinema sectors, the projects
pioneered and supported by the state have been very successful. TV series
produced in Türkiye are watched by nearly 500 million people in 150 countries
from New Zealand to Brazil. Our TV series and movies can easily find a place on
the world's biggest platforms.”
Pointing out that
creative industries are not just about TV series and movies, Hisarcıklıoğlu
said that the other 15 sub-sectors should be taken into consideration with the
same importance.
Hisarcıklıoğlu stated
that it is important to increase the added value produced by the sector by
directing state support to all sub-sectors of this industry and said, “In the
global economy, the importance of elements such as intellectual property,
copyright and patents that do not pollute the environment and enable the
production of value-added products is increasing day by day. The total size of
the sector worldwide exceeds 2 trillion dollars. Türkiye's creative industries
sector ranks 8th among developing countries in terms of volume.”
Pointing to the
importance of public institutions and the private sector working in harmony to
increase the volume of creative industries, Hisarcıklıoğlu said:
“For this purpose, our
Creative Industries Sector Council acts as a bridge between the public and the
private sector. Our Council has voiced the rights and laws of our sector in
every environment and ensured that many issues are brought to the agenda before
our public institutions. As TOBB, we will always continue to stand by the
creative industries sector. In this sense, I think it is very important for the
government to give more space to the creative industries in its promotional
efforts. We should focus on training and support programs to become the leader
of the content economy that spreads around the world, especially through
digital communication channels.”
- Deputy Minister of Industry and Technology Zekeriya Coştu
Zekeriya Coştu, Deputy
Minister of Industry and Technology, said that creative industries are at an
important point for both the world economies and the country with the added
value potential they create in other economic activity areas.
Stating that the number
of Technoparks in Türkiye has exceeded 100 in the last 20 years, Coştu said:
“Among more than 10,000 companies in these centers, approximately 900 companies
are active in different fields of creative industries. We are trying to
contribute to more than 900 companies in the sector with many elements ranging
from insurance premiums to grant support in the projects they carry out. We
have provided more than 38 billion liras to the creative industries ecosystem
in both technoparks and design centers.”
Pointing to the
importance of being not only a user of technology but also a producer of it,
Coştu emphasized that Türkiye is a country that has proven its capacity,
competence and success in technology development.
Coştu stated that the
Ministry is ready to support the creative industry ecosystem in the development
of both artificial intelligence applications and Turkish big language models.
- Deputy Minister of Trade Volkan Ağar
Deputy Minister of
Trade Volkan Ağar also noted that creative industries in the world have become
a major area of economic productivity with intensive intellectual property,
high economic added value, and the ability to create a wide range of income and
employment.
Stating that creative
industries in Türkiye provide high added value to the country's goods and
exports, Ağar said that the sector contributes significantly to the “new
generation export” vision.
Ağar pointed to the
sector report published by the United Nations (UN) Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD) and continued as follows:
“According to the
report, we see that in 2020, global creative product exports reached 524
billion dollars with a 3 percent share in total goods exports and global
creative service exports reached 1.1 trillion dollars with a 21 percent share
in total service exports. In terms of creative goods exports, Türkiye's exports
in 2020 amounted to 9.3 billion dollars with a share of 1.8 percent in global
creative goods exports. In 2023, our country's creative product exports
amounted to 14.9 billion dollars.”
Deputy Minister Ağar
also provided information on the sector's current position in service exports
and said, “Our productions in the genres of series, feature films, animations,
documentaries and program formats have risen to a remarkable position in the global
market in the last 20 years, competing with the productions of countries such
as South Korea, India and Brazil, which are our competitor countries after the
United States of America on a global scale. In 2012, our country was able to
export approximately 70 productions to 39 countries, and today, with a wide
range of content averaging more than 1,500 productions per year, our
productions meet with more than 800 million viewers in more than 150 countries
in many different geographies from the Middle East to Latin America, from
Southeast Asia to Africa, from Europe to North America.”
- TOBB Türkiye Creative Industries Council President Ata
Kavame
Ata Kavame, President
of TOBB Türkiye Creative Industries Council, pointed out that the sector is the
gateway of hundreds of thousands of people and that young people constitute the
focal point.
At the summit, panels
will be organized on various topics such as the economic impact of creative
industries, government support, artificial intelligence, innovation, export-oriented
trade and Türkiye's dominant role in this field.