PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Lunch Meeting with Turkish Businessmen on 13 October 2014

Thank you Mr Minister. Thank you very much for joining me to attend the lunch for this Joint Business Committee Meeting. We have been developing our relations with Turkey over the last few years and I am very honoured to be here and to bring a business delegation with me, for my first visit to Turkey. We have been following Turkey’s development and progress from afar. It is a distance away from Singapore to Turkey but in this modern world, in fact, we are not far apart. We have observed how you have grown steadily, dramatically over the last decade. We have seen how you have developed your relations with existing partners as well as new ones all around you, whether in Europe, Middle East, EurAsia or Africa. And we too in our part of the world, are looking for new partners, new opportunities for cooperation and for growth.

Singapore is in the middle of the vibrant region in South East Asia. We are a member of ASEAN – ten countries cooperating together in a grouping working towards an Asian Economic Community which will be completed by the end of next year, which will include free trade in goods, services, movements, connectivity, transportation as well as many aspects of economic cooperation amongst the ten countries. Singapore is a free trading country but we believe that through this Asian Economic Community, we will be able to have a market of 600 million people with a substantial amount of purchasing power because the middle income and middle classes are growing, and because the countries are all prospering in their own ways.

At the same time, we are also cooperating with other countries in the region, in many other schemes of economic cooperation. We are participating in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) which brings Singapore together with America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Latin American countries – Peru, Chile – as well as Vietnam and Brunei. It is a range of countries on both sides of the Pacific, developed as well as developing, which will be a substantial economic community when it is completed. We also have another grouping which is one the West side of the Pacific which includes all of the ASEAN countries as well as North East Asia, India, Australasia. So Singapore prospers but as part of a region which is developing and integrating together.

At the same time, within Singapore we are upgrading our economy, transforming ourselves and looking for new opportunities to invest overseas, new partners to invest in Singapore, and new opportunities to trade with other countries because we are in a way at a developed level of per capita GDP but in other ways, in terms of our level of technology and in terms of the comprehensiveness of our economy, in terms of our companies reaching abroad, I think we have some distance to go before we count ourselves a fully developed country like America, Japan or Germany. So, we are looking for new partners and I think between Singapore and Turkey, there is good potential. As the Minister pointed out, our trade volume is growing but still quite modest. Our investment numbers are growing also but still quite modest. I brought with me this time, amongst the business delegation, companies which have invested in Turkey, for example PSA, which has invested in the port in Turkey and ST Engineering, which is an engineering company interested in working on systems for your mass transit train, service train systems, as well as companies in consumer goods which are interested in developing and exploring your consumer markets, and looking for opportunities to partner and to work together in third countries also.

We are working together between Singapore and Turkey on a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), as the Minister has explained. I discussed this with your President, at that time Prime Minister Mr Erdogan, last year. He supported it and we are very happy that it is now being negotiated and we are making good progress. As the Minister said, the goods part is more or less negotiated. The services part always will be more difficult but that is where the will be greater dividends, if we are able to overcome these difficulties, we would be able to do more together. There is a whole range of areas where we can work together including government procurement and transportation. We hope that we will be able to use this both as a symbol of the good relations between our two countries as well as a scheme between which we can strengthen our cooperation and yield practical benefits to companies which want to trade and invest in one another. I hope that my trip this time with the business delegation would be able to help push this process another step forward. I will be in Ankara tomorrow, meeting your leaders, and I am sure that following from this we will be able to work further and take it another step forward. So thank you for coming to lunch and I look forward to a fruitful exchange with you.

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