The selection of target markets for Turkish olive oil by multi criteria decision techniques

Worldwide olive oil consumption still is a very small part of total oil consumption. However, increasing health awareness, the fact that olive oil is actually a kind of fruit juice (not chemically modified) and the increase in the purchasing power of developing countries will increase the demand for olive oil in the future. From the sectoral view, it is seen that the 5,5 billion $ olive oil market is dominated by the big players such as Spain and Italy but for the future it seems that they won't be able to deliver all the demand from developing countries by themselves. In particular, there is no increase in the number of olive trees in these countries and periodicity due to the changing weather behaviour influences the productivity in a negative manner. These countries has been solving that problem by reexporting, which means that first they import from the olive oil producer countries and than export the imported olive oil to the big markets under their labels. Basically they use the other producers as their suppliers. For the last decade the number of olive trees in Turkey has increased from 90 million to 160 million. It is expected that the olive oil production will have reached 500 thousand tones by 2023. Turkey's performance is not satisfactory with 141 millon dollar export of olive oil. The quality and labelling is insuffiecient and the production of the small and medium sized companies is too low and to supply the big amount of olive oil demanded by the giant companies such as Metro, Real, Wallmart, Carrefour. Unless Turkey wants to be trapped by Italy and Spain, Turkey has to find its own markets,where Turkey can gain more added values and and find sustainability in the export. In this research, the target markets for the export growth of the olive oil of Turkey are chosen by using multicriteria decision making techniques. The criterias are selected not only from the current potantial of the olive oil consumption but also from the future potantial of the olive oil consumption. There are 4 main criterias including 15 subcriterias. The criterias are collected from the literature and discussed with a group expert consisting of 10 people from producers. academicians and non-government organizations. The weights of the criterias are calculated by using Analytical Hierarcy Process. The pairwais comparisons are determined by the indivuaduals in the group. The main criterias to order the countries are economic situation, olive oil market, economic relation and culture differences and Turkey's position in olive oil market. In general, the criterias are not only related with the current position of the market but also the criterias chosen are also related with the future of the market. From that point of view, the reseearch is succesfull to find the markets with a future potential. When the weights of main criterias are compared, all of them expect economic situation criterias have the same waight. The current olive oil market with 30,7% is the most impoartant main criteria. The trade and cultural closeness criteria %26,7. The current situation of Turkey in the market is 28,2%. Economic situation of the country is only 14,1% respectivly. The most important sub criteria is the unit price of olive oil paid by the country (%12). The least important criteria is the GDP growth rate per person (%3,2). The subcriteria real values are found in global databases and then normalized. The target markets are ordered by using Simple Additive Weighting Methods. The results are compared also with the expectation of the 20 companies. The research shows that instead of exporting developed markets, Turkey has to choose the markets, where eceonomic activity has been increasing and where the taste of the olive oil has been recently discovered. Especially the countries with the similar business culture, close trade relations and GDP growth can be selected as target markets for the future. The olive oil production companies still feel that their target markets should be today's markets. That means, they are much oriented with the high consumption markets in the world. On the other hand, the research shows that the Turkish companies should try to approach the develeping markets, beacuse there is a big tendecy of the olive oil consumption increase in those countries and they really pay high prices for the olive oil. The rich Middle East countries should also be target markets because they pay high prices and Turkey has the advantage of logistic costs and business experience. Even though the consumption of Turkic republics are very limited today, their economic performance indicates that they could be consumers with the high prices of the future and Turkey's close relation with these countries is a clear competitive advantage. BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries should be very attractive for Turkey, because of high economic growth and olive oil consumption potential. European countries are not seen very attaractive in this research because they protect Italy and Spain by holding high tariffs on Turkey. Even though Spain and Italy are the top importers, they are also not seen attractive for export market due to their reexport policy. The most important fact that is revealed in this research is that the future of the Turkey's export is the olive oil consumption of the developing countries. The consumption of the developed markets has increased just 200 million dollar from 4,4 billion to 4,6 billion dollar for the last decade. Turkey has limited chance in those markets because they were conquered by Italy and Spain and high tariffs are in effect for Turkish olive oil. On the other hand, the consumption of the developing countries has tripled from 300 million dollar to 1 billion dollar. As the results show, developing countries should be direction of Turkish olive oil export.