Europe’s Biggest Technology Complex Opens in Turkey

So far, $360 million dollars has been spent on the complex, whose estimated cost will be $500 million dollars. Vestel City occupies 750 square metres of the Organized Industrial Region.In addition to its digital products and televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, and air conditioners will be produced.

Vestel City is expected to provide jobs for about 100,000 people in almost 100 related industries.Zorlu Holdings chief of executive committee Ahmet Nazif Zorlu, who spoke at the opening ceremony, promised to produce 1 million television sets when the company was first purchased."These promises were a part of our big dream," said Zorlu.Zorlu also emphasized that they were aiming to produce 30 million appliances by 2005 and have exports worth $3 billion dollars."We saw that, by thinking big and acting on our ideas, dreams come true."

Vestel Firms group performance committee president Omer Yungul said that Vestel City products would be designed and built by Turkish engineers and added that they had reached a capacity of 12 million units in the high-end TV industry."This means 12 times the size of the Turkish market and 5% of the world market. In the European market we are already the leader. Right now with the 12 million unit capacity, we produce a TV every 2,5 seconds. In 2005 we are going to bring our TV production capacity up to 15 million units."With the power these new foundations will give us, we are aiming for $2 billion dollars of exports in 2004 and $3 billion dollars in 2005. We are going to provide employment to a total of 13,600 people," said Yungul.