Corona-burglary outweighs political doubt: The shaky plans for a new VW plant in Turkey are definitively off the table. Long the largest car company in the world had time left with his repeatedly deferred “final” decision. Now, criticism of the Erdogan government was not, however, the rash, but the slump in sales in the virus crisis.
“The build-up of additional capacities is not from today’s point of view is necessary,” said Volkswagen on Wednesday tersely to the justification. The global demand for cars was weak, as the billion investment in Manisa, near Izmir, apparently, still it would be worth it.
Actually, the project was decided as well as – after a long competition, in the beginning, Bulgaria and Romania were involved. VW wanted to supply the West, Turkey to the markets of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the first “very positive macro-economic environment” and had meadows. Now the picture is quite different: The decline in demand in the sector of the pandemic is immense, there is excess capacity, the red threaten.
Turkish economy suffers from the crisis
But the VW-project stand – at least partially – already not a good. After in the previous year, growing criticism of the human rights situation in Turkey and the military offensive by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Northern Syria had become loud, be moved, the wolf Burger, the last valid “Go” for the Construction multiple times. Most recently, he was on the ice the chances of Implementation are unclear. Members of the European Parliament asked the Commission in Brussels to examine whether the project with EU legislation to be incompatible.
It had exercised the Turkish auto lobby pressure on the Investor. And VW founded an own subsidiary in the country. The company was registered in the commercial register and with a capital of the equivalent of 164 million US dollars, equipped. Worldwide, the group operates more than 120 plants, the Turkish government had seen a possible new building in Izmir as an important prestige project.
