Is it hard to do business in Türkiye? The objections, answered

Founders raise the same five objections, in roughly the same order, on roughly the same call. They are reasonable objections. Four of them turn out smaller than they look once you have the numbers, and the fifth is a genuine problem that has to be planned around.

"Inflation will eat it"

The most quoted objection and the least relevant one for an exporter.

Two things defuse it. The per-item caps inside the programme are revalued upward every calendar year by the statutory revaluation rate, so the ceilings track prices rather than falling behind them. And the spending being claimed is mostly in hard currency to begin with: a studio's advertising, app store commissions and cloud bills are denominated in dollars and euros, and the reimbursement is calculated on those invoices.

Where inflation does bite is on lira costs, chiefly salaries, which rise. That affects your cost base, and it is the same pressure every employer in the country manages. It does not erode the claim. We looked at this properly in does inflation cancel out the incentives.

"The lira is unstable"

If your revenue is in hard currency and your costs are in lira, currency weakness helps you rather than hurting you. That is the position most exporters here are in.

The reimbursement is paid in lira, which is the one place to pay attention: money that sits in a lira account loses value while it sits. Companies that treat payouts as working capital rather than as savings do not notice the issue.

"The bureaucracy will be a nightmare"

Partly true, and mostly manageable.

Turkish filings are monthly, and they are unforgiving of gaps. That sounds worse than it is once an accountant is running them, which they must be from the first month. What foreign founders actually find hardest is narrower than "bureaucracy": getting the bank account open, and getting billing details right across a dozen vendor accounts.

The second one is genuinely a week of somebody's life if it is done retroactively, which is why we push so hard on setting up accounts in the company's name from the start.

"Banking will be difficult"

This one is real.

Opening a corporate account for a company with foreign shareholders takes time, because banks run their own compliance on the ownership chain. It cannot be rushed by paying more, and the timeline depends on the bank and on how many jurisdictions the ownership runs through.

Plan for it to be the slow step. Start it the day the company is registered rather than the week you need it. Everything else in the setup can proceed in parallel.

"I do not speak Turkish"

You do not need to.

Filings and official correspondence are in Turkish. That is what the accountant and the adviser handle, and it is the reason those relationships matter more here than they might at home. Day to day, the industry operates in English: the studios in Istanbul hire internationally and run in English, and the technical talent pool is used to it.

Where it matters is in the paperwork nobody sees, and that is the part you are hiring for.

What is actually on the other side of the objections

Once the setup is done, the arithmetic is straightforward. Half of what you spend reaching customers abroad comes back, and up to seventy percent when those customers are in a target country. Income from those customers is not taxed under the export regime. Employer social security is capped.

Against that, the honest costs are a few weeks of administration, a monthly accounting relationship, and a bank account that takes longer than you would like.

The objection nobody raises and should

None of the five above is what costs companies money. The thing that does is the six month filing window, and it does so quietly, because there is no error message. A company that spends six months getting organised before filing anything discovers that the earliest invoices in the batch have expired.

That is the risk worth worrying about, and it is entirely within your control. Everything else on this page is either priced in or somebody else's job.