Turkish mattress industry still needs booming

Turkish mattress industry still needs booming

 

Only a few decades ago, almost 80 percent of Turkish people were sleeping on traditional wool, cotton and some foam mattresses. After 1980s significant growth and international expansion of Turkish economy, the mattress business has also started to grow extraordinarily.

 

In spite of this very fast growth at the Turkish mattress business, it is still not on the level it should be. The European and American mattress businesses have started to late 1880s and there are many important players of the industry still acting currently very well. When we look at the Turkish mattress industry players, there are some companies started at 1950-1960s but main producers and big industry actors started after 1980’s.

 

For long years, Turkish mattress producers sold their mattress to Turkish consumers in local market. The local demand was very big and profit level was satisfactory against export markets. The main international expansion of the Turkish mattress business started right after 1999-2000s when there was deep depression at Turkish economy and devaluation on the Turkish Lira. The local demand has been lowered for long time and because of strong foreign currency, exportation became more profitable and attractive.

 

Comparatively very low employee cost, weakened Turkish lira and motivated producers has started to be exporter rapidly but after a few years time crisis has come over and Turkish mattress producer turned their direction again to Turkish market where are still strong and fruitful demand. Since that time local demand still very high and there are not too many export-oriented companies in the market.

 

Today, the sum of total exports of the Turkish mattress industry is very poor level. According to reports, Turkey’s total export value of the finished mattress is only around USD65 Million. This number is only equal to one middle size European mattress producer’s export turnover. Moreover, only 3-4 companies make more then 80% of this USD65 Million exports themselves. In this finding outs we should consider that we are mentioning only mattress exports when we look at mattress components and machinery export turnover, we can see that total export value is much more bigger and growth is incredibly worthy of note.

 

Turkey is getting to be a center for the mattress industry mainly for components and machinery. The hospitality and health tourism industries have been getting bigger and cause mattress demand. In parallel of growing economy Turkish people are getting wealthy, living in bigger houses and asking more mattresses. On the other hand, according to a research, the life cycle of mattresses is also going down in Turkey. Turkey became a sourcing country and a gate between Asia and Europe.

Middle East, Central Asia, Southern Caucasus and North Africa also very fast growing mattress markets and Turkey is a door for these countries because of economical and geographical positions. These countries’ mattress businesses are growing with Turkish mattress components, machinery and mattress producers. Moreover, many Turkish white and blue-collar employers have been working in these countries.

 

With this thought-provoking determination, we think that the Turkish mattress business, especially international expansion of the business is still not big enough. We strongly believe that the Turkish Mattress industry will have a boom in a couple of years. There will be more new echoes of the Turkish mattress producers in the market and we will see important international matters business players will start to act in the market in a very short while. Only within year 2015, 2 important Mattress producer’s share has been bought with the international funds. All these signs prove that the booming of the industry is not far.

 

In our next articles, we are going to mention about the main reasons historical slow expansion and main signs of booming expectations. SleepWell Magazine and SleepWell Expo are having a very important role in the growth of the Turkish mattress business. Please follow us and send us your comments and suggestions to my e-mail address “[email protected]“. I will share your comments in my column.

 

Best Regards

Onder Honi