Why the widest-exporting firms are not the ones you want
Sorting Turkish exporters by number of export markets looks like sorting by capability. It is not. It sorts by how many product groups a company is active in, which is a measure of diversification, not of furniture.
The finding
Across all 8,923 firms, the average number of product groups per firm is 2.25. Band the index by how many markets each firm exports to, and the two rise together without a break:
- Export marketsFirmsAvg. product groups
- 07231.66
- 13,8121.92
- 2–42,5852.40
- 5–91,0152.76
- 10–195183.00
- 20–9992703.59
A firm with no listed market carries 1.66 product groups on average. A firm selling to twenty or more carries 3.59. Among the fifty widest exporters the average is 4.46, and 17 of them are active in six or seven of the seven groups this site covers — carpet and ceramics and stone and lighting and metalwork and textiles, all at once.
What that actually describes
A company active in six product groups and sixty markets is a large diversified exporter or the Turkish arm of a multinational. The top of the list is populated by commercial-equipment makers, panel and board producers, appliance and electrical firms and industrial groups — companies for which furniture is one customs group among several.
None of that is a criticism of those firms. It is a statement about what the sort is measuring. Export breadth is a proxy for corporate scope, not for hospitality capability.
The shape at the other end
Most firms are the opposite. 3,812 export to exactly one market and 723 list none; the median is 1 and the mean 3.6, pulled up by a long tail that reaches 72. A specialist contract joinery works supplying two or three markets sits in the crowded part of that distribution, indistinguishable by market count from a firm that exports nothing.
So what should you sort by?
Not by breadth. Start from the destination pages to find firms already selling into your market, and the city and district pages to find firms in a cluster you can visit. Then qualify them on the things that decide a contract order: capacity, references, lead time and certificates.
Derived from the 8,923 firms and 32,386 firm–market pairs in this index.