Iran negotiations… What will the agreement bring to the Turkish economy?

When Greece accepted the conditions of the creditors, the world economy heaved a deep “sigh” of relief.

The agenda is vigorous.

While many matters like the FED's statements directed at the interest increase, the increasing risk perception in Chinese markets, which are important from the point of global markets, are being intensively discussed in the agenda, additionally, this week the agreement over the nuclear negotiations between Iran, Germany and the five perpetual members of the United Nations had been finally included in the agenda.

Within the context of the agreement between Iran, US, China, France, England, Russia and Germany; Iran will be opening their nuclear studies to international supervision and in exchange the embargos, which had been implemented towards Iran for a long time, will be lifted.

In the case the embargos are lifted, the estimations are that the exportations and investments towards Iran will be doubled.

When the situation is like this, we start pondering the question “What will be the gains our country can obtain after the embargos are lifted?”

Let us state this; Turkey is one of the countries that will receive the biggest share from the Iran cake… According to the data of 2013, Iran's top 3 commerce partners are; China with 41 billion dollars, United Arab Emirates with 31 billion dollars and India with 16 billion dollars. In terms of trading volume, Turkey is in the 4th spot with 15 billion dollars. From the point of our country, as of 2014, this number was actually around 13.7 billion dollars.

Geographically being close to Iran, whom we have 14 billion dollars' worth of commercial relations with despite the embargos, is increasing the possibility of profiting from the normalization process in Iran. So much that, with the advantage of being close to Iran geographically, we can say that a serious exportation potential will be formed in fields, where the embargos will be lifted, like; food, medicine, medical equipment and automotive spare parts.

Moreover, it's necessary to state that during this process the limitations on the trading of gold, which is used as a payment tool in petroleum and natural gas trades with Iran, will be lifted and operationally the energy importation will become easier.

Besides these points, we cannot disregard the Turkish companies' interests towards Iran's privatization projects, which is around 130 billion dollars in total. Furthermore, we can see that the Turkish business world has many plans in the investment and trade fields, other than privatization. Within this context, since Iran is the last big economy, to which large investors didn't enter yet, it's possible to reach the result that the ones, who will invest in Iran at the right time and in the right way, will be getting the better of it.

Lastly, we need to state that our country's energy bridge role in the global environment will be increased as Iran, who can only export 1 million barrels of petroleum due to embargos, returns to the natural gas markets with full power. This situation implies that, Turkey, who came into prominence on the matter of energy route following the disagreement between Ukraine and Russia, will be gaining more importance geopolitically.

As a result; following the liberalization process, which will be experienced in the forthcoming process, Iran, which is an extremely important economic partner for our country with its population close to 80 million people and underground resources, will become the center of attention in terms of international trade and investments. As for Turkey; due to the advantages provided by being close geographically and the existing joint shares with Iran, Turkey will be in the list of countries that gets the better of this situation.