Often referred to as the country where East meets West, Turkey recently bitterly marked 50 years since its first application to integrate formally with Europe, a date overshadowed by its troubled EU accession talks.
Turkey is home to 75.7m people, 35% of which have access to the fixed line internet at this time. On the other hand, 62.33million Turks, or 83.92% of the population, is a cellphone subscriber - so expect a disproportionate amount of visitors from there via the mobile internet and not from its fixed line cousin.
Although most medium-sized and large companies have websites, they are used mainly for promotion rather than commercial transactions. An exception is banking, where the main incentive is lower costs rather than increased sales.
Credit card penetration there boomed to 44 million as of November last year – up from 34 million in 2007. Meanwhile, there are about 59 million debit cards in circulation, unchanged from back then.
However, the credit-crunch has hit Turkey particularly hard – combined credit card debt has grown to $2 billion as of April this year, and non-performing credit card loans have ballooned to $1.6 billion.
To tackle the debt problem, Government officials announced in June that new regulations would be introduced that would rein in “annual fees on credit cards, minimum payments, and credit card debt”.
In the meantime, we have noticed a significant increase in sales from this market – probably mainly due to the extraordinary popularity in cell phones there. Since Turkey does not have a local pay-per-call infrastructure, surfers are invited to make a regular international call instead. We have revenue-share agreements with telecommunication carriers in the country to which the call is sent.
If you decide to target the Turkish speaking market, do so in their native language of Turkish and bear in mind that a further 1,7million of them live in Europe’s largest market Germany, thus making them the largest ethnic minority based there.
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