Turkish Textile Industry Statistics

Like a resilient loom threading people and policy into fabric, Turkey’s textile and apparel industry directly employs 1.2 million people and supports over 2 million livelihoods overall, provides about 8 percent of national employment and a quarter of manufacturing jobs, features nearly 45 percent women in garment production and higher youth employment than the industrial average, leans on family-owned SMEs and competitive wages roughly one third of Southern Europe, absorbs roughly 150,000 Syrian refugees and over 500,000 ready-to-wear workers, and combines modest unionization and steady turnover with public investments in textile engineering, scholarships and subsidized on-the-job training to keep the sector skilled, flexible and cost-effective.

Turkey has quietly become a global textile heavyweight, spinning denim, knitwear and ready-to-wear out of Istanbul to feed markets from Germany to the United States, generating over $31 billion in exports, delivering higher value-added per dollar than the automotive sector, and showing resilience with growth amid global slowdowns while commanding about 3.6% of world trade.

By leveraging a customs union with the EU, a post‑Brexit tariff‑free UK deal, three‑day truck access to European capitals and top‑tier manufacturing quality, Turkey has sewn itself into the heart of global textile supply chains, ranking second for EU textile supply, third for apparel exports, among the top five denim and knitted fabric exporters, the world's leading sock supplier, the third largest exporter of towels and bathrobes, and a primary source for major brands that entrust over 15% of their production to Turkish factories.

Turkey’s textile sector is a quietly formidable industrial "thread", pairing the world’s seventh-largest cotton harvest and about 1.7 million tons of yarn with Europe’s largest denim output, over 20,000 manufacturers, installed spindle capacity above 7.5 million and some 800,000 rotors, more than 50 integrated fiber-to-fabric facilities and regional hubs like Bursa and carpet-dominant Gaziantep, which together have driven roughly 12 percent production growth over the last decade, sustained 75 to 80 percent capacity utilization and sizable global shares in carpets, home textiles and synthetic fibers.

As the world's second largest organic cotton producer and the only major grower of entirely GMO-free cotton, Turkey is quietly turning its textile sector into a sustainability powerhouse, combining ambitious policy and investment; targeting carbon neutrality by 2050; scaling recycling and rPET production and recovering around a million tons of textile waste a year; expanding water recovery, waterless dyeing, laser finishing and solar use; certifying hundreds of firms under GOTS while backing R&D in over 25 techno-parks and funding hundreds of innovation projects; and building marketplaces and audits that push the industry toward true circularity, in short making sustainability not just a label but a competitive advantage.