The bedding industry, which supplies raw materials and technology producing factories for domestic and foreign bedding manufacturers, has raised Türkiye to the 2nd place after China with its production exceeding 3 billion dollars. Reminding that Türkiye ranked 6th in the sector in 2021, Osman Güler, President of the International Bedding Industry Association (IBIA), said; “We have brought this up to the 2nd place. China is in the first place. China is also in the first place due to its own dynamics. When we consider the 40 billion dollars of production in the world, China makes 1/4 of this production. It is quite normal for it to be ahead, but we are not content with that and aim to get the biggest share of this pie”.
The mattress industry’s export target is 3 billion dollars
Osman Güler explained that the association was established to ensure the development of the bedding industry, to increase the exports of the companies in the sector and to increase their competitiveness in the world and stated that the Turkish bedding industry exports to approximately 150 countries. “We are an industry with a total volume of over 3 billion dollars. We export approximately 2.5 billion dollars of this to 150 countries,” he said and noted that one of the main goals of the association is to increase the exports of Turkish companies, and that they aim to increase the exports to 3 billion dollars.
Güler pointed out that there is a serious global crisis in the world; “We visit all the fairs related to the industry in the world and according to our interviews with bed manufacturers, there is a decrease of approximately 30-40 percent in this industry in different countries. This affects us seriously and we organized a serious fair in order to ‘What can we get from the existing capacities; how much more export and production can we do’,” he stated.
He noted that more than 6 thousand people from abroad visited the IBIA Expo-Mattress Subsidiary Industry and Technologies Exhibition, which was held for the 3rd time this year, and that the event participants were also very happy and that they had determined the roadmap for the next event to be much better; “We could not have had a better exhibition in such a difficult economic period. There was not much crowd, but almost all of the visitors were very niche and important people,” he said. Güler added that they aimed to make Türkiye, Istanbul, a ‘trade centre’ in the bedding industry and that he believed they would achieve this.