In an interconnected global economy, fostering collaboration between domestic Turkish companies and their foreign counterparts has become increasingly crucial. Acting as a mediator between these two entities, individuals or organizations play a vital role in facilitating communication, building relationships, and driving successful business ventures. This article explores the significance of acting as a mediator and highlights the key benefits it brings to both domestic Turkish and foreign companies.

Cultural Understanding and Communication

One of the fundamental challenges when working across different countries and cultures is the potential for miscommunication and misunderstandings. As a mediator, our role is to bridge this gap by facilitating effective communication and ensuring that messages are accurately conveyed and understood. By possessing a deep understanding of both Turkish and foreign cultures, we can navigate cultural nuances, language barriers, and business etiquette, creating a more harmonious environment for collaboration.

Establishing Trust and Building Relationships

Trust is the foundation upon which successful business relationships are built. As a mediator, our objective is to foster trust between domestic Turkish and foreign companies by demonstrating impartiality, transparency, and integrity. By facilitating open dialogue, addressing concerns, and finding common ground, we help establish a strong foundation for long-term partnerships. Building these relationships not only benefits the companies involved but also contributes to the growth and development of the Turkish business ecosystem as a whole.

Negotiating Win-Win Agreements

Negotiations between domestic Turkish and foreign companies can often be complex and challenging due to differences in business practices, legal frameworks, and market conditions. Our role as a mediator is to facilitate negotiations that result in mutually beneficial agreements. By identifying shared goals, exploring creative solutions, and finding common interests, we can help companies overcome obstacles and reach agreements that satisfy both parties. This not only strengthens individual business ventures but also promotes bilateral trade and economic growth.

Mitigating Legal and Regulatory Complexities

Navigating legal and regulatory frameworks can be a daunting task, particularly for foreign companies seeking to enter the Turkish market. As a mediator, we can provide valuable guidance and support in understanding the legal requirements, licenses, permits, and compliance obligations necessary for successful operations. By facilitating cooperation between legal experts, we help streamline the process, minimizing risks, and ensuring compliance with relevant laws and regulations.

Facilitating Knowledge and Technology Transfer

Acting as a mediator enables the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and technology between domestic Turkish and foreign companies. Through collaborative efforts, Turkish companies can gain access to innovative technologies, advanced management practices, and global best practices. In turn, foreign companies benefit from local insights, market knowledge, and access to the vibrant Turkish market. This knowledge and technology transfer contribute to the overall growth and competitiveness of Turkish industries.

Acting as a mediator between domestic Turkish and foreign companies

Acting as a mediator between domestic Turkish and foreign companies is a critical role in today’s interconnected business landscape. By leveraging cultural understanding, effective communication, and negotiation skills, mediators facilitate trust, build relationships, and drive successful collaborations. Our efforts contribute to the growth of the Turkish economy, promote bilateral trade, and foster innovation through knowledge and technology transfer. As the global business landscape continues to evolve, the role of mediators becomes increasingly indispensable in creating a more connected and prosperous business environment for all parties involved.

Challenges for foreign companies in Turkey

As a developing country with great development potential, Turkey has attracted enormous volumes of foreign direct investments (FDI). There are many opportunities that foreign companies can take advantage of, including the large and fast-growing domestic market, an improving institutional environment, various investor-friendly policies in regional and centrally controlled special economic and high-tech development zones, an ever improving quality of human resources, and better infrastructure. 

Despite these opportunities, foreign companies increasingly face a variety of challenges especially during the “soft-landing” of Turkish economy. Perhaps due to the clear signals in 2018 of the anti-globalization tendency, the IMF forecasts decreases in some of the main economic factors in years ahead, not only in Turkey but also in many other major economic entities. The increasingly unfavorable international environment will have significant influences on foreign companies in Turkey, such as causing fiercer competition from local companies who shift back to the domestic market. Another notable disadvantage that foreign companies cannot ignore is the liability of being outsiders. 

Doing business in a foreign country is not an easy task, and the dynamic Turkish market contributes to an even more challenging environment. Despite its impressive economic development, Turkey is still a transitional economy, as it is arguably still moving from a position were few market supporting institutions existed. Thus, it may still be problematic to apply management approaches from advanced Western countries in Turkey.

Regulatory Challenges

Foreign businesses in Turkey face government, legal, and regulatory challenges on two main fronts. First, Turkey is an emerging market, characterized by a comparatively weak and fast evolving judicial and regulatory institutional environment. There is great flux in regulatory change across a broad range of spheres, including: environmental regulation and pollution prevention; capital/financial sector regulation; housing and real estate regulation; labor markets; and digital media content, to name but a few areas. Related government procedures, moreover, are generally less transparent. This can mean that relatively standard everyday tasks, like obtaining permit and product approvals, for example, may potentially become a drain on management resources.

Second, and arguably of far greater importance owing to their asymmetric impacts, local and central level governmental actors can potentially exploit local institutional fragility and regulatory flux to preferentially favor and support domestic firms.

Innovation Management Challenges

Innovation management in Turkey is an important topic for both foreign firms and domestic stakeholders. It has been manifested largely through collaborative partnerships between foreign firms and domestic ones in the form of joint ventures in the last four decades. In the form of international partnerships, learning from collaboration partners can contribute to capacity building and industry upgrading. Despite many joint ventures facilitating knowledge, learning, and gaining experience in the development of innovation capabilities, foreign partners largely prefer not to share the core of innovation with Turkish domestic partners. This is in part due to the lack of intellectual property rights protection. Furthermore, when regulatory frameworks allowed, joint ventures tend to be converted into foreign wholly-owned subsidiary in Turkey. In this way, foreign firms may develop and protect innovation within organizational boundaries. In addition, Turkey’s economic development demands the transformation from “Made in Turkey” to “Created in Turkey”, in order to move up the global value chain in global competition. Importantly, Turkey’s innovation challenge is to overcome the middle-income trap to become an innovation economy.

Human Resource Management Challenges

Along with the development of the Turkish economy, HRM has become an increasingly important topic in Tukey. Foreign capital brought modern HRM into Turkish market, leveraging from foreign-owned enterprises (FOEs) to joint ventures (JVs) and further to large domestic companies. Foreign companies introduced formalized high-performance HR practices, which have been attractive to Turkish employees. The transitional Turkish employment system has gradually changed from capital-oriented to talent-oriented after several decades of industrialisation.

Comprehensive Legal Services

At Bicak, we offer comprehensive mediation services to facilitate collaboration between domestic Turkish companies and their foreign counterparts. Our skilled mediators possess in-depth cultural understanding and effective communication techniques to bridge the gap between different business practices and languages. We excel at establishing trust and building strong relationships, ensuring a harmonious environment for successful partnerships. Our expertise lies in negotiating win-win agreements that address the unique challenges faced by both domestic and foreign companies. We navigate the legal and regulatory complexities, providing guidance and ensuring compliance throughout the process. Additionally, we promote knowledge and technology transfer, fostering innovation and contributing to the growth of Turkish industries. Partner with us to unlock the immense potential of collaborating between domestic Turkish and foreign companies, and drive mutual success in the global marketplace.