The round table “Göbeklitepe: Understanding the past with a look towards the future” was held at the Yunus Emre Institute – Turkish Cultural Center in Rome, Italy.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently inaugurated the new mega-highway project linking Istanbul and Izmir, which by population are respectively Turkey’s largest and third largest cities. He also was able to mark the opening of Bursa City Hospital, the 10th hospital in a series of 31 throughout Turkey.

DP World Yarimca, one of Turkey’s largest container terminals, joined the main international rail network and now serves as a link between China and Europe. Having started operations in Turkey’s İzmit Bay in 2015, DP World Yarımca is now connected to the country’s railway network, enabling the terminal to integrate with anywhere that is within the reach of Turkey as well as the Caspian Sea and China via the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku Railway.

Turkey held the second wind power plant tender as part of its Renewable Energy Resource Zones (YEKA) project. The total 1 GW tender was split into 250 MW each across four provinces in Turkey—Aydın, Muğla, Balıkesir, and Çanakkale.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan chaired the 6th meeting of the Reform Action Group held on May 9, 2019, under the coordination of Directorate for EU Affairs, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Treasury and Finance, and Ministry of Interior.

The Turkish economy is continuing its rebalancing, rebounding on the back of industrial production, which expanded for the third consecutive month through March. Capacity utilization rate in manufacturing reached 75 percent in April, while employment generated 68,000 new jobs in February and retail sales rose for the third consecutive month through March.

In the lead up to the local elections on March 31, 2019, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan held public meetings throughout Turkey, where he inaugurated a number of infrastructure investments and heralded new ones in the pipeline.

FDI inflow into Turkey totaled USD 13.2 billion in 2018, up 14 percent year-on-year at a time when the global appetite for FDI shrank a considerable amount. This shows that despite all the adversities Turkey has undergone in the past two years, there has been no decrease in investor appetite in the country.

Japanese technology giant Secom and Turkish financial technology company Aktif Bank, a subsidiary of Çalık Holding, have jointly announced the establishment of Secom Aktif Yatırım A.Ş., a 50:50 partnership that will offer end-to-end security solutions to companies and individual users with its turn-key project models.

US-based food and beverage giant PepsiCo commissioned its sixth production facility in Turkey with a ceremony honored by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.