E-commerce in Turkey continues growth: CEO

E-commerce investments, which have been boosted as the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions affected store and mall shopping habits, have hit 10 billion Turkish Liras ($723.4 million) in two years, Sendeo CEO Özgün Şahin has said.

"The [e-commerce] sector had expanded by around 50 percent in 2020. In 2021, it peaked again. A growth of 75 percent was recorded in the first half of 2021 compared to the same period in the previous year," he told daily Hürriyet.

"The rising demand has brought forward investments. In the last two years, the e-commerce sector made investments of 10 billion liras on average," he added.

Around half of the consumers and sellers who were canalized to e-commerce during the pandemic-related restrictions tended to continue online trading even after those restrictions were lifted, according to his remarks. "That is a significant number," said Şahin.

Koç Holding's courier company will make further investments of $60 million by 2025, he also said.

As many companies appealed to tech-based solutions to ramp up online sales, some 50,000 vehicles and 200,000 delivery workers hit the roads in Turkey every day, estimates show.

Sendeo, which has 500 delivery workers and 780 employees in total, is planning to increase those numbers to 2,000 and 2,500, respectively.

"We aim to have 11 transfer hubs, 45 distribution centers and 2,400 delivery points as of the end of the year," Şahin said, adding that the fleet of the company has reached 500 vehicles.

The share of e-commerce in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retail market reached 6 percent during the period, according to a report released by NielsenIQ in November 2021.

"Turkey closely follows countries such as China [30 percent], South Korea [26...