ANKARA — During a visit to Ankara, the first in a decade, Egypt's Trade and Industry Minister Ahmed Samir Saleh and his Turkish counterpart Omer Bolat, announced Tuesday that they would seek to increase mutual trade volume between the two countries by 50% in five years.
In a statement after Tuesday's meeting, the Turkish Trade Ministry said that Saleh and Bolat set the goal of increasing the bilateral trade volume as part of a road map they agreed on during their meeting.
“Increasing the mutual trade volume to $15 billion, which currently stands at some $10 billion, in five years has been set as a target,” the statement said.
The trade meeting precedes a potential visit by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to Turkey, to seal the normalization process between the two countries after a decade of deep freeze. Sisi’s planned July 27 visit to Turkey was postponed as it coincided with the Russia-Africa summit, according to Egyptian media outlets citing Egypt’s Foreign Ministry.