E-TURQUALITY: what it takes to get into the Branding Programme

Most companies claiming Türkiye's IT export incentives are in the Standard Programme, formally the Service Sectors Breakthrough Programme. It has no revenue threshold and no admission process: you register, spend, file and get paid.

Above it sits the Branding Programme, and the track inside it built for IT companies is E-TURQUALITY. It pays against a single annual ceiling of 500,000,000 TL, around $10.5 million at roughly 47.7 TRY to the dollar, and several of its items carry no separate cap of their own. Getting in takes an application and a paid review before anything is claimed.

This post covers the entry side: whether your company qualifies today, what the process asks for, and what it costs to go through.

Which track applies to you

The Branding Programme has three tracks: Marka, TURQUALITY and E-TURQUALITY. Article 33 of Decision No. 10962 reserves E-TURQUALITY for companies in the IT and digital intermediation sectors, so a game studio, a SaaS company or an AI company applies there.

Marka is the smaller track. Its ceiling is 250,000,000 TL a year, about $5.2 million, and each brand is supported for four years. E-TURQUALITY doubles the ceiling and runs longer: five years per target market for each brand, five years for the corporate infrastructure and staff items, and for as long as the brand stays in the programme for everything else.

A company can enter on Marka and move up later. Time already supported on the Marka track comes off the E-TURQUALITY period, so the clock carries over instead of restarting.

The revenue test

Article 51 of the circular sets the threshold. On the date you apply, three things have to be true:

• The company was set up at least three years earlier.
• It earned money from customers abroad in each of the last three calendar years, with none of them blank.
• Those earnings averaged at least $1,500,000 a year across the company and any Turkish company organically linked to it.

There is a faster route in the same article for companies that grew quickly. A company set up at least two years earlier, whose earnings from customers abroad over the last two years total $10,000,000 or more, skips the three-year test.

"Organically linked" is defined in Article 61 and comes down to 51% ownership in one direction or the other, or consolidation into audited accounts with an effective stake of at least 51%. A group running a Turkish holding company and a Turkish operating company counts both sets of foreign earnings toward one test, which matters more often than you would expect, because studios frequently split the entity that signs the store contracts from the one that employs the team.

The trademark conditions

More applications come apart here than anywhere else, and the problem can take months to fix, so check it before anything else.

• The Turkish registration of the brand has to be in the company's own name.
• The foreign registration can be in the company's name or that of an organically linked company, and it has to have gone through in at least one country that is party to the Madrid Protocol.
• The Turkish filing date has to be on or before the foreign filing date.

That last condition catches companies that registered in the US or the EU first and got around to Türkiye afterwards, which is the normal order for a studio that incorporated abroad and moved later. The brand itself also has to avoid country, city or region names and anything that would sit badly against the image of Turkish services.

Two further requirements are easy for a real company to meet: the main management of the business has to sit in Türkiye, and you need a product or service that is ready to sell to customers abroad rather than one still in development.

What your company has to be doing

Article 51 adds a sector list for IT applicants. The company has to be offering blockchain, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, big data, smart city or other commercial software, embedded software, a digital game, a mobile application, communication services or IT services.

For anyone reading this the answer is almost certainly yes. The list exists to keep the track pointed at software companies.

The application and what it costs

The application goes in with the documents listed in annex EK-32. If it is accepted, the Ministry assigns a management consultancy from its own approved list to carry out a preliminary review of the company and the brand, and that review decides which track you are admitted to.

The review is paid for by the applicant: 500,000 TL including VAT, about $10,500, due within one month of the assignment being notified. Miss that month and the application is treated as failed, with a six-month wait before you can try again. Once it is paid, the review starts within a month and the report goes to the Ministry within a month of the work finishing.

After admission comes the Strategic Business Plan, a five-year roadmap for the brand prepared to the Ministry's template. You have up to a year from admission to submit it, and it has to be prepared by a different consultancy from the one that ran the preliminary review. Article 71 of the circular reimburses up to 2,500,000 TL of the cost, about $52,000, once per brand.

One rule sets the pace of everything that follows: no support payment is made until the Ministry approves that plan. Activities and payments made while you are in the programme are all claimable, and they wait in the queue until approval comes through.

The trade-off to settle before you apply

Article 33 is direct about it. For as long as a company is supported under the Branding Programme, it does not claim under the Standard Programme, apart from items paid to co-operating organisations.

The two programmes are weighed against each other. For a company sitting at the threshold the comparison is rarely close, because the same advertising spend that is capped at 50,000,000 TL a year in the Standard Programme runs to 100,000,000 TL a year under E-TURQUALITY, and the per-product cap goes from 15,000,000 TL to 25,000,000 TL across twice as many products. Below the threshold the question does not arise, and the Standard Programme is where the money is, particularly at 70% in the Ministry's target countries.

Either way the six-month filing window on each payment keeps running while an application is in progress, so claims under the programme you are in today should not pause while you plan the move.

If your company is near the $1.5 million line, the useful next step is a look at your last three calendar years and your trademark position, because those two answers decide everything else. Before that, put a year of your spending into the calculator to see what the Standard Programme pays you today, which is the number the Branding Programme has to beat.