CHINA LOVES ESKISEHIR

China has shown great interest in Eskişehir. The joint venture group Urzat, established by ATMO Group and Urzema Holding, will start production in Eskişehir as of September.

20,000 UNIT PRODUCTION CAPACITY

Within this scope, SWM becomes the first Chinese brand to start production in Turkey, while in December, another Chinese brand, JAC, will also begin production of its new electric vehicle, the E30X, through the Urzat project. Urzema Holding CEO Murat Ertaş stated, “In our factory in Eskişehir, we will start our production activities with a capacity of approximately 20,000 units over the next two years.”

WE BECAME A CENTER OF ATTRACTION IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

The joint venture group Urzat, established by ATMO Group and Urzema Holding, will start production in Eskişehir as of September. Providing details about the project, Urzema Holding CEO Murat Ertaş noted that Urzema Holding, with its sub-brands, exports to more than 40 countries and has many years of experience in industrial fields, particularly in the automotive sector.

Emphasizing their goal to make Urzat a new global power hub, Murat Ertaş said, “At the core of Urzat lies the commercial expertise of ATMO and the engineering experience of Urzema Holding. As Urzat, we have defined a strategy to turn our local culture into a joint production center for global brands, supported by Urzema Holding’s experience. Yes, it happened rather quickly, I admit — but that’s quite natural. After all, in 1961, Turkey built the Devrim Car in just 120 days. These passionate Turks can achieve anything once they set their minds to it — that’s a fact. In the global economy, the supply chain has become one of the most critical game-changers, and I believe it should shift from global markets toward Turkey. Some brands, when investing abroad, also bring their subcontractors, and those subcontractors assemble their own country’s parts in ours, presenting them as if they were locally made. Instead, with our supply chain team, we have built a wide network of skilled local suppliers across Turkey — and we have succeeded in doing so,” he said.

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THE STORY OF THE REVOLUTION HAD TO BE COMPLETED

Murat Ertaş stated that there was an unfinished story left from the “Devrim” (Revolution) in Eskişehir and said: “Someone really needed to complete this story. Eskişehir is the city with the highest export surplus in Turkey. With its incredible technology, Eskişehir Organized Industrial Zone is the second-largest organized industrial zone in Turkey after Gaziantep. Both the local administration and the Eskişehir Organized Industrial Zone have made great efforts to support Urzat’s investment there, and we currently have a 1 million square meter allocation that is under expropriation. In our Eskişehir factory, we will start production activities with a capacity of approximately 20,000 units over the next two years. Meanwhile, in the second phase, between 2027 and 2029, we will move to a larger production facility. Thus, our vehicle capacity will increase to 40,000 units, both in number and model variety. We are not establishing an ordinary assembly workshop here, nor did we set out to do so, because in Urzema Holding’s DNA, there is no such thing as doing something that’s already been done. By 2026, we will have reached a localization rate of around 25–30%, which is quite convincing for a newly established production facility. The following year, in 2027, we aim to increase this rate to around 40%. Forty percent is a psychological threshold for us. However, taking into account the newly issued regulation, we want to raise our localization rate above 50% so that we can obtain the ‘Made in Turkey’ certificate for these vehicles. We want, we desire, that vehicles produced with the labor of so many people in this land be exported and used all over the world as Turkish-made products. Therefore, within the next four years — even if it seems impossible today — we have a goal of achieving a localization rate above 51%. Sometimes difficulties bring incredibly beautiful results. The regulation introduced in 2024 imposed an additional customs duty on vehicles imported from China. While many international corporations hesitate to invest in Turkey today, brave Chinese investors, with the right partners such as ATMO and Urzema, had no hesitation in investing here or being here. Moreover, they did this without receiving any government incentives or support. We decided to carry it out with our own equity, within the limits of our resources, because we know that both the current economic conditions and the state itself have much m

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