Turkey’s foreign trade deficit rose by 72 percent year-on-year in February to $2.98 billion, according to the general trade system and data released by the statistics institute on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
Turkey’s exports increased 2.3 percent and its imports rose 9.8 percent over February 2019, the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat) said.
The institute said the manufacturing sector’s share of exports was 95 percent, while agriculture, forestry and fisheries accounted for 3.2 percent, and mining and quarrying, 1.2 percent, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.
TurkStat added that the share of high-tech products was up by 0.1 points to reach 3.4 percent of manufacturing industry exports and dropped by 1 point to 12.9 percent of imports year-on-year in February.
Last month Germany remained in its position of Turkey’s largest export destination, with exports totaling $1.34 billion.
Iraq, the UK, Italy and the US were other largest export destinations with $906 million, $857 million, $766 million and $740 million, respectively.
Russia was the main source of Turkey’s imports last month with $1.71 billion, followed by China ($1.7 billion), Germany ($1.6 billion), the US ($1.13 billion) and Iraq ($750 million).