Turkish finance minister flags Iran war trade fears

• Şimşek warns of short-term pressure
• February trade deficit increase
• Promise to support exporters

Turkey’s finance minister has warned worse is to come after the country’s foreign trade deficit blew out in February, with Mehmet Şimşek saying the fallout from the war in the Gulf will put Turkish exporters in the firing line.

While talking up February’s trade figures, which showed near record-high export numbers, treasury and finance minister Şimşek also noted a far higher increase in imports, which took the month’s trade deficit to $9.2 billion.

He added that the gap was likely to widen in the immediate future due to the crisis in the Gulf. 

“Conflicts in our region are expected to put short-term pressure on the foreign trade balance through oil prices and transportation costs,” Şimşek said on his social media account, while promising to, “support our exporters in every area, especially in access to finance”.

The minister’s comments came just after Turkey’s Ministry of Trade issued the import-export data for February, which showed a sharp increase in the trade deficit. 

Alamy/Zakariya Yahya/ImagesLive

While February exports increased 1.6 percent to come in at $21.06 billion – just short of the best result on record for the second month of the year – imports ballooned to $30.3 billion, with the 6.1 percent rise in imports producing the widening trade deficit.

Despite the strong February, exports over the first two months of the year dipped, with the January and February combined total being $41.4 billion, down more than $500 million on the same period in 2025.

On top of this the trade deficit for the opening months of the year climbed to $17.5 billion. This puts Turkey well on track to eclipse last year’s trade shortfall of $92 billion, even before the effects of the conflict in the Gulf are felt.

Local exporters will be heavily impacted by the war, according to Ahmet Fikret Kileci, vice president of the Turkish Exporters Assembly.

“Of course, exports will sustain losses because of the current situation, this is inevitable,” he said. 

“Turkish exports were already facing problems due to shrinking markets, losing our competitive edge due to low foreign currency exchange rates and high borrowing costs.”

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In particular, those exporters trading with the Gulf states – one of the few regions that had been posting solid growth – will be hard hit, Kileci said, with the UAE and Saudi Arabia among the top 20 buyers of Turkish goods and services. 

However Kileci said there was a silver lining in the clouds of war hanging over the Gulf, in that Turkey had long experience with trading with conflict zones. 

“We have developed some immunity towards chaos and while we are not able to change the conditions, we have learnt to adapt to them quickly, finding ways to continue to trade and minimise losses.”