Economy
Queen of Belgium leads large economic delegation visit to Türkiye
Queen Mathilde of Belgium is visiting Türkiye from May 10-14 as part of an “Economic Mission” alongside a high-level delegation aimed at boosting bilateral economic and commercial cooperation, according to Turkish Foreign Ministry sources.
The delegation accompanying the queen will include Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Maxime Prevot, Defense Minister Theo Francken, who is also responsible for foreign trade, Brussels-Capital Region Minister-President Boris Dillies, Flemish Region Minister-President Matthias Diependaele, Walloon Region Vice-President Pierre-Yves Jeholet, as well as 428 private sector representatives.
The visit is expected to demonstrate the shared willingness of both countries to further strengthen Türkiye-Belgium ties, which have recently gained momentum, particularly through the diversification of cooperation areas and the comprehensive expansion of economic and trade relations.
Within the framework of the mission, investment and business opportunities are expected to be explored in key sectors including energy, defense industry, aviation, logistics, health and life sciences, banking, technology and digitalization.
The program is also expected to include company visits, bilateral meetings and business-to-business (B2B) contacts between firms from the two countries.
The Türkiye-Belgium Economic Forum is also scheduled to be held during the visit, while intergovernmental agreements and documents in the fields of defense, aviation and social security are expected to be signed alongside agreements between private sector representatives.
The mission is also expected to highlight the achievements of the Turkish community in Belgium, which has become an integral part of Belgian society and contributes significantly to the country’s economic and social life.
Ministers participating in the delegation are expected to meet with their Turkish counterparts, while the delegation will also hold contacts with various public and private sector representatives in Istanbul and Ankara.
Türkiye-Belgium relations
Relations between Türkiye and Belgium, which have traditionally remained at a positive level, have gained further momentum in light of recent regional and global developments, with contacts aimed at closer cooperation increasing in recent years.
Talks between the two countries have focused on evaluating cooperation opportunities in areas expected to shape the future of bilateral ties, including economy and trade, defense, energy and connectivity, while also strengthening cooperation within NATO and the European Union in the face of common challenges.
The bilateral trade volume between Türkiye and Belgium reached $9.2 billion (TL 417.20 billion) in 2025, including $5 billion in Turkish exports and $4.2 billion in imports.
Belgian investments in Türkiye totaled $9.3 billion between 2002 and January 2026, while Turkish investments in Belgium amounted to $490 million during the same period.
Around 300,000 Turkish citizens living in Belgium serve as an important bridge between the two countries and make notable contributions to Belgium’s economic and social life.
‘New phase’ in ties
Commenting on the visit, Türkiye’s Ambassador to Brussels Görkem Barış Tantekin said on Saturday that the mission marks a new phase in bilateral relations.
“It can be said that this upcoming economic visit, taking place for the first time in 14 years, represents the beginning of a new phase under different conditions and within the framework of renewed relations,” Anadolu Agency (AA) quoted him as saying.
Tantekin noted that Belgium, as a founding member of the EU and a NATO ally, approaches its ties with Türkiye from a strategic perspective.
He added that the Belgian delegation will begin its visit with field visits to Turkish defense industry companies in Ankara and Istanbul, highlighting the importance of cooperation in this sector.
The mission will focus on strategic sectors, including energy, defense industries, space, aviation, as well as logistics and transportation, which Tantekin said are key to shaping future economic and geopolitical developments.
He said Türkiye’s priorities include advancing trade relations, building joint partnerships in third countries, and addressing broader issues such as updating the Customs Union with the EU and enhancing integration in value chains.
Tantekin also described the visit as a significant political opportunity to redefine relations with the EU and NATO within a broader strategic framework.
Belgium’s Economic Mission visits
Belgium’s “Economic Mission” visits, organized twice a year, are regarded as one of the country’s most significant economic diplomacy initiatives with a strong political dimension.
The missions typically feature a range of events centered on key sectors of bilateral economic relations with the host country and aim to promote concrete cooperation opportunities.
Belgium previously organized an Economic Mission visit to Türkiye in 2012. The mission at the time was led by King Philippe, then crown prince, while Queen Mathilde accompanied him as Princess Mathilde.
One of Meta Platforms’ artificial intelligence models accessed the internet on its own and hacked another company, the company said Thursday, the latest in a series of disclosures about AI models going rogue.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic also have described instances of AI models going beyond humans’ instructions to access the web and find ways around other companies’ digital security.
Meta said in a statement that a “misconfiguration” during cybersecurity testing by Irregular, an independent company hired by Meta, inadvertently allowed one of its models to access the internet.
“The model subsequently exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a manner similar to previously-reported instances with other companies,” the company said. Meta said it is investigating the incident and will issue a report when that’s complete.
The disclosure has added to worries about AI models acting autonomously.
Separately this week, the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute announced it had found “unsanctioned agent behavior” during cyber testing. In one case, an agent created fake online identities to pressure a person to approve use of malicious code.
“On investigation, we found that some of the agents being tested had engaged in sustained, potentially harmful activity directed at real people and organizations,” AISI said Tuesday. “We declared a security incident and, within roughly one hour of discovery, had contained it and begun a full investigation.”
During the agency’s testing, Anthropic and OpenAI models took “autonomous, unsanctioned action” on the internet. Some guardrails to prevent misuse had been disabled, the agency said.
“As was standard in our cyber testing, we had intentionally permitted internet access, and model-provider cyber classifiers were deliberately disabled – conditions that do not reflect how frontier models are made available to the public,” AISI said. “We do this to best assess the maximum capability of models.”
Anthropic said it is “grateful” for AISI’s work and added that it underscores the need for a broader conversation about how to safely evaluate AI agents as their capabilities grow.
OpenAI said the AISI incidents took place “in testing environments with reduced safeguards, under conditions that do not reflect ordinary use.” It added it will continue working with others across the industry to “strengthen shared practices for conducting evaluations safely as models become more capable.”
The first company to disclose a hack late last month, OpenAI said it had tasked the AI models involved with pursuing “advanced exploitation using complex attack paths” to test cyber capabilities, but the technology went to unexpected lengths. It apparently decided on its own to target Hugging Face, a well-known AI development hub and marketplace, to obtain information it needed to carry out a task.
A spokesperson for Irregular, the San Francisco-based AI security company, said the Meta episode involves a test-environment issue that was disclosed last week by Anthropic.
Irregular said it’s writing a paper to share “best practices for containment” to prevent such incidents in the future and securely run cyber tests.
Turkish construction company Kalyon Inşaat said Thursday it had begun construction work on the United Arab Emirates’ first high-speed railway, one of the Gulf region’s largest transport infrastructure projects.
The company is a part of an international consortium awarded the Abu Dhabi section of the Abu Dhabi-Dubai High-Speed Rail Project by Etihad Rail, the developer and operator of the UAE’s national railway network.
The flagship company of the Turkish conglomerate, Kalyon Holding, is carrying out the project alongside UAE-based National Projects and Construction and Trojan Tunneling, and China’s China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC).
The project forms part of Etihad Rail’s $13 billion plan to develop a passenger railway network spanning approximately 900 kilometers across the UAE.
Once completed, the line will reduce travel time between Abu Dhabi and Dubai from around 90 minutes to 30 minutes.
The railway will operate at speeds of up to 320 kilometers per hour, making it the UAE’s first high-speed rail line. Existing railway lines in the country operate at speeds of around 200 km/h.
First of its kind
The full Abu Dhabi-Dubai high-speed railway will extend approximately 150 kilometers.
Under the consortium’s contract, the Abu Dhabi section will include around 97 kilometers of railway track and four stations.
The route will also feature an 11.2-kilometer twin-tube tunnel, one of the project’s major engineering components.
The railway is scheduled for completion in 2031.
Kalyon Inşaat Chair Murathan Kalyoncu said the project will be the first of its kind in the region and reflects the company’s engineering capabilities and growing international presence.
He described the project as not only a strategic investment for the United Arab Emirates but also an important milestone in global railway engineering.
“We will bring the engineering expertise and experience gained through large-scale infrastructure projects in Türkiye and around the world to the UAE’s first high-speed railway, while continuing to represent our country successfully in international markets,” Kalyoncu added.
U.S. workers again saw their slice of the U.S. economy drop to a record low in the second quarter amid an ongoing productivity boom that is producing output gains that are outpacing wage growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on Thursday.
The so-called labor share of nominal gross domestic product (GDP), which BLS defines as the percentage of output that accrues to workers in the form of compensation, fell to 52.9% in the second quarter from 53.7% in the first quarter.
That was the lowest since the series began in 1947, BLS said, as it reported stronger-than-expected growth in second-quarter productivity.
The labor share has been falling for decades, driven by forces such as the diminishing breadth and power of organized labor and globalization that shifted relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs to low-cost overseas production centers.
More recently, the economy has seen technological advances like automation and potentially artificial intelligence that allow companies to increase output without substantially adding to headcount.
The trend essentially means that benefits of productivity gains are accruing more toward business owners and shareholders than to workers through wage gains.
Real weekly earnings – which measure wage growth against inflation – were essentially unchanged during the first half of 2026, though the most recent data for June snapped three straight months of falling readings and was the strongest in six years.
Retail sales across the eurozone dropped unexpectedly in June after rising moderately in May, suggesting that consumption continues to weigh on the economy in the second quarter, official data revealed on Thursday.
Retail sales decreased 0.3% in June from May, Eurostat reported. Sales had increased 0.4% in May but fell 0.4% in April.
The decline came in contrast to economists’ expectations for a slight increase of 0.1%.
ING economist Peter Vanden Houte said data reinforced the view that consumption was not a major driver of growth in the second quarter. Some improvement can be expected, but a genuine consumption boom looks unlikely at this stage, he noted.
Sales of food, drinks and tobacco fell 0.5% and that of non-food products slid 0.4%. Meanwhile, sales of automotive fuel in specialized stores increased 1.5%.
On a yearly basis, retail sales posted an expansion of 0.7%, which was weaker than the prior month’s 1.9% increase and economists’ forecast of 1.0% growth.
Retail sales in the European Union edged down 0.1% from May but increased 1.2% from the previous year.
Among member states of the EU, the largest monthly decreases in sales volume were reported in Finland, Romania and Germany. Meanwhile, Luxembourg, Portugal, Croatia and Sweden registered the highest increases.
Syria has achieved self-sufficiency in wheat production for the first time since the outbreak of its civil war in 2011, an agriculture official said Thursday, marking a milestone for the country’s food security after years of depending on imports.
As well as the war hitting the agriculture sector hard, Syria has seen drought in recent years, with the United Nations saying 2025 saw the country’s worst climate conditions in decades, also impacting wheat-growing land.
“There won’t be any need for (wheat) imports this season,” said Ahmed Qadoun, deputy general director of the Syrian Grain Establishment, adding that Syria had last been self-sufficient in 2010.
On Wednesday, state news agency SANA reported that the grain establishment had received 2.7 million tons of wheat from across Syria during this year’s harvest, exceeding the national annual requirement of 2.55 million tons.
Before the civil war erupted in 2011, Syria was self-sufficient in wheat, producing an average of 4.1 million tons annually.
But after the conflict and drought disrupted production, Syria’s dictator Bashar Assad used to rely on imports, particularly from ally Russia, for wheat.
Syria’s new authorities took power in 2024, and the country said last year that it had received wheat shipments and donations from countries including Russia and Iraq.
The United Nations said in June that more than 13 million Syrians, or over half the population, were facing acute food insecurity.
German giant Siemens is another company benefiting from the artificial intelligence investment boom, reporting its highest-ever quarterly industrial profit and raising its full-year guidance on Thursday.
Siemens said it was seeing strong demand for data centers used to process AI, as well as for AI-enabled software and devices used to control factories and buildings.
Sentiment was also improving from aerospace, defense and machine-building customers, prompting the company to raise its full-year profit guidance after beating third-quarter expectations.
“Our sharp focus on driving industrial AI and our strong positioning in attractive markets give us a solid foundation for our success,” CEO Roland Busch told reporters.
The company’s industrial AI products, which help customers speed up innovation and improve productivity, were driving growth, he added.
Siemens was also benefiting from strong demand from the electronics and semiconductor makers, many of which are expanding capacity to supply AI-related equipment and chips.
“There is tremendous demand for electronics,” Busch said.
“They are building more and more factories, and they need to be automated, which is where Siemens’ business comes in.”
Siemens was working with nine of the Top 10 largest data center providers, he said, while orders had increased by a triple-digit percentage in the first nine months of its 2026 fiscal year.
Highest quarterly industrial profit
Companies like Siemens, Swiss rival ABB and France’s Schneider Electric are seeing surging demand as Big Tech races to add data centres, chips and electricity capacity for AI training and operation.
Capital spending by five of the largest technology companies, a key driver of the global data-centre boom, is expected to rise 75% in 2026 from more than $400 billion in 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in April.
For the quarter to the end of June, Siemens reported industrial profit rising 25% to 3.52 billion euros ($4.09 billion), its highest quarterly figure, beating forecasts of 3.18 billion euros in a company-gathered consensus.
Revenue rose 7% to 20.79 billion euros, ahead of forecasts for 20.64 billion euros, while orders picked up 13% to 27.90 billion euros, also a quarterly record.
Its shares still fell 5.2% in mid-morning trading.
Up to Wednesday’s close, they had gained nearly 20% from the beginning of the year to hit a record high at 291.50 euros in the session.
The company also said it had agreed with German tax authorities on the treatment of Siemens Healthineers shares that it plans to distribute to investors following the planned spin-off, meaning the distribution would be tax-free for Siemens shareholders.
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