Yes, but how? There was no foreign currency!... There was no oil import, so there were constant power shortages. The only goods that could be sold were hazelnuts, pistachios, and tobacco…Import-substitution policies were not generating foreign currency. Tofaş had to keep manufacturing cars, but needed to bring parts from abroad. Yet, how? Having found himself at the running accounts, financing, budgeting, and statistics unit of Tofaş’s accounting department in 1973, Selçuk Öncer was merely in his 20s at the time. As a young finance employee, his career had begun in a system that was trying to generate inexistent funds and transform them into production; he was to contribute to the growth and development of Tofaş’s production over the years. What could perhaps be described as “productivity under duress,” helped find answers to facilitate production in the absence of foreign currency in the late 1970s. Some of the answers were provided through the efforts, to which Selçuk Öncer contributed: There was no foreign currency in Turkey. You couldn’t import anything. Out there was a queque of people waiting to buy automobiles, but since we couldn’t import the goods, components were stuck at the customs. We had the money in Turkish Lira, but we couldn’t transfer it due to the shortage of foreign currency. So, what to do? We had a decree issued by the Central Bank of Turkey: it said in effect, “Go, find your own foreign currency.”… Afterwards, we deliberated over it both at the company and at the holding…. We decided to go directly to the gastarbeiters in Germany, to take advantage of this decree. Our objective was as follows: let us have the foreign currency flow into Turkey from abroad, deliver
Automobiles were sold in exchange for foreign currency in order to combat the foreign exchange bottleneck in the late 1970s.
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