Where Is Value Added Born? An Honest Answer to "But It Has Chinese Components"

Conversations about domestic manufacturing have one unchanging scene. Somebody praises a locally made product; somebody else points at a component on the board: “But there’s Chinese parts inside.” The debate ends there — as if something had been proven. This essay is an attempt at an honest answer to that scene.

What everyone knows and nobody says

Whatever brand the phone in your pocket is — American, Korean, European — a substantial share of its components comes from the same geography. It is the same in our sector: open the control board of the most established European automation brand and the integrated circuits you will see come from the same supply basin as the ones on ours. The whole world depends largely on the same sources for intermediate goods; the European does, the American does, and so do we.

So what does the sentence “it has imported components inside” actually measure? Nothing. Because it asks the wrong question.

The right question

The right question is this: where is the value added born? In a control board, the real value lies not in the chip itself but in the circuit design that brings those chips together, in the software, in the test engineering, and in the organisation that stands behind the product. If that work is done in Türkiye, the product returns to this country as engineering capability, employment and tax — regardless of the passport of its components.

The other side of the coin is lit by the same question. An operation that brings in finished goods by the container and ships them from a warehouse — however bright the brand it represents — leaves no manufacturing value in this country. Warehouse rent, a handful of salaries and a sales operation: that is the entire contribution. The difference between the two is not the size of the business model; it is the quality of what each leaves behind.

On watering one’s own field

Let us make one thing clear here, because this argument can easily be bent: this essay was not written to say “buy from us”. The companies creating manufacturing value in this sector in Türkiye are not one but many — a producers’ map stretching from panel forming to motor manufacturing, from control boards to curtain tailoring, growing more crowded every year. When the pandemic hospitals rose in record time, a large share of their doors was made by colleagues on that map; some of those doors were not ours, and we felt nothing but joy about it.

We are not trying to channel the water into our own field. We are defending the rain itself — because in Anatolia, when it rains, everyone gets wet.

Carry the measure in your pocket

Next time the “is it really domestic?” debate opens, look past the component label to three questions: Where was it engineered? Where is it manufactured? Who stands behind it? If the answer to all three is Türkiye, the birthplace of the chip on the board is a footnote. Our set of certificates is the written record of our own answers to those three questions — and we would ask you to put the same questions to every manufacturer, ourselves included.