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The world’s largest international textile machinery exhibition ITMA, hosted the machine producers from Turkey in Barcelona. Turkish machinery sector exhibited its new products at ITMA fair with 164 companies. Turkey was among the top 5 countries in ITMA Fair assigning a huge success, but treatment of organizers of the fair to Turkish exhibitors was discomfort. The purpose of participating in ITMA Fairs, which is very important for Turkish textile machinery and sub-industrialists, is to bring its products in production together with the world textile industrialists and to increase exports.
It is very important to attend the ITMA fair which is the most important event of the textile sector. Our companies who want to take part in this organization, not only consider the stand and transport costs, but also allocates serious budgets for promotion. The expectations of the companies from the activity is a smiling face and tolerance. Inequality and injustice between firms affects participants. The common demands are “organization firm should protect the rights of our companies or at least offer equal opportunities to its European competitors”. According to the interviews with our companies participating in ITMA, it shows that most of our companies are not satisfied with the fair.
COMMON ISSUES
Considering the difficulties experienced by Turkish participants in ITMA, the booths at the fair do not satisfy themselves. In all the halls, most of the Turkish participants were placed either on the wall bases, in narrow corridors or at the back of the halls. The stand areas are separated from the visitors, away from walking corridors, side by side or facing with Turkish competitors. Visitors from Egypt, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran and Indonesia could not have received a visa. These people are potential customers and cannot come to the fair due to visa application. The negative behavior of some personnel was remarkable in order to eliminate the problems experienced in the fair area such as electricity and air. At the same time, forklit operators were very careless and impervious. Although the products damaged due to carelessness are reported to ITMA authorities in minutes, it is not known whether there are any sanctions. The problems experienced with the logistics company in the installation of the machines and the assembly process after the exhibition take a long time. In the entrance of the fair, especially in the morning, the daily problems can not be solved. The problems experienced in the entrance tickets to the fair are a separate problem. For daily visitors, there should be a shuttle from the airport to the fair and the city center. ITMA Organizers disrupted the layout of corridors and areas to sell lots of space. It is a big scandal that ITMA Organizers did not give stand for TEMSAD which is the roof organization of textile sector.
UNFAIR BEHAVIOR FROM CEMATEX TO TURKISH FIRMS
The association of the sector was also disturbed by unresolving of the problems of the Turkish companies representing Turkey that always remains in the top first five places regarding both the participants and visitors. TEMSAD Association summarized their discomfort that they had: “Not allocating an area where we could host and solve the problems of our visitors’ coming from Turkey and different countries is a very wrong behavior and unfair. CEMATEX clearly showed unfair attitude to Turkish firms and Turkey. That the countries which are trying to teach equality and democracy to the world showed an unfair behavior today in such a serious organization like ITMA. We acknowledge our participating companies to be right regarding their complaints. In general, you can see that the locations of the Turkish participating companies were much worse than the stand locations of the CEMATEX member countries.”
(The ideas belong to the authors and they do not reflect the opinions of tekstil & teknik)
