Exports were up to $9.57 billion in June, while imports reached $15.19 billion, giving a deficit of $5.62 billion, a report by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) released on Friday revealed. The deficit was 34.9 percent greater than that of the same month last year, when it amounted to $4.17 billion. Correspondingly, the rate of exports over imports suffered a fall from 66.7 percent to 63 percent from June 2009 to 2010. Turkey's exports were $8.34 billion and imports amounted to $12.5 billion in June of last year.
In the first half of 2010, Turkey enjoyed a 14.9 percent upswing in exports year on year, reaching $54.83 billion. But during this period imports rose more sharply than exports, registering an increase of 33.6 percent to $83.32 billion. These results caused the deficit to soar by 94.6 percent to reach $28.5 billion in the first six months of the year.
The rate of exports over imports sustained a stunning fall from 76.5 percent in the previous year to 65.8 percent at present. Last year, exports amounted to $47.72 billion and imports were $62.37 billion in the first half, rendering the deficit $14.64 billion.
In June, Turkey’s exports to debt-ridden EU countries increased by 5.1 percent to reach $4.19 billion year on year, though their share in the country’s overall export pie fell from 47.8 percent to 43.8 percent. Germany was again Turkey’s main trade partner in June, buying $855 million worth of goods from Turkey. This figure was 7.5 percent more than during the same month last year. Germany was followed by the UK with $567 million in imports from Turkey, Italy with $549 million and Iraq with $480 million. Furthermore, Turkey imported the most from Russia in the sixth month of the year, at $1.8 billion. It was followed by China ($1.51 billion), Germany ($1.38 billion) and the US ($1.1 billion).
Turkey’s intermediate goods imports were up by 37.1 percent to $60.31 billion in the January-June period of the year over one year before. Money spent on capital goods purchased from abroad also rose by 24.7 percent, to $11.91 billion, during this period, with the remaining $10.85 billion spent on consumption goods imports. Intermediate goods made up 72.4 percent of all imports in the first half of the year, while this figure was 14.8 percent for capital goods and 13 percent for consumption goods, with other imports accounting for the remaining 0.3 percent.
In June, exports of vehicles other than railway or tramway rolling stock had by far the highest value, at $1.15 billion. This was followed by exports of iron and steel at $870 million.
