Türkiye on Friday said it had approved Uber Technologies Inc.’s acquisition of ​the delivery arm ​of Turkish company Getir from ⁠Emirati controlling shareholder ​Mubadala.

The global logistics giant said ⁠in February it had agreed to acquire ⁠Getir’s ​delivery arm, ​expanding the U.S.-based company’s Turkish ​footprint.

“The commitment by Uber ​Technologies Inc. to invest a total of US$500 ​million in Türkiye ​is expected to support high-quality ‌employment, ⁠strengthen local engineering capabilities, and positively contribute to the development ​of ​Türkiye’s ⁠digital and technology infrastructure,” the Competition Authority (RK) said on Friday.

The deal comes after Uber purchased the majority of the stake in another popular delivery service firm – Trendyol Go – in Türkiye last year.

Following the closing of the deal, Uber said it plans to combine Getir and Trendyol Go.

Uber also announced last year it would establish a software and technology development center in Türkiye, with plans to invest $200 million.

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Türkiye is raising the transit fee charged on international vessels passing through the Turkish straits by almost 15% as of July, a top official said on Friday.

The fee, calculated under the 1936 Montreux Convention in “gold francs” and based on vessels’ net registered tonnage, is updated annually.

“We will update the fee charged per net ton from ships, which was $5.83 in 2025, to $6.70 as of July 1,” Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu said.

Türkiye had charged $0.80 per net ton from 1983 until Oct. 7, 2022, Uraloğlu told Anadolu Agency (AA).

The fee was revised to $4.08 per net ton in 2022. It was later raised to $4.42 from July 2023, $5.07 from July 2024, before being hiked to $5.83 last year.

The Turkish straits, comprising the Bosporus and Dardanelles, are among the world’s most important maritime chokepoints, connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Uraloğlu said vessels passing through the waterways without stopping at Turkish ports are charged under three categories in line with the Montreux Convention: health inspection, lighthouse and salvage services.

He said the latest revision will increase foreign currency revenue for the Treasury.

Revenue from ship transits stood at $38 million between July 2021 and June 2022, before rising to $223 million between July 2024 and June last year.

That figure is expected to reach $254 million as of late June this year, Uraloğlu said.

“The rise in revenue and the price updates show the contribution to the economy,” he said, adding that the revision aims to strengthen foreign currency inflows and increase public revenue.

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The U.S. Navy has allowed more than a dozen ships through to Iranian ports, lifting a blockade as part of an agreement to end the war, Vice President JD Vance said Thursday.

Vance also said he plans to go to Switzerland for talks with Iran this weekend, but that the plan could change.

The U.S. military also confirmed that American forces on Thursday lifted their naval blockade of Iranian ports after more than two months of preventing ships from sailing from or to Iran.

“Today, U.S. forces lifted the blockade on all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports and coastal areas,” U.S. Central Command said in a post on X, adding that American warships “will remain in the general area to make sure that all aspects of the agreement are adhered to.”

The updates came at a White House press briefing, where Vance said more oil is now flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. The Republican vice president said more than 12.5 million barrels went through the shipping channel Wednesday night.

“So we’re also honoring our end of the early part of the agreement on the military side,” he said, citing it as an immediate benefit of the deal as he downplayed criticism that the agreement tilts in favor of Iran.

And in an extraordinary rebuke, he warned U.S. critics in Israel against “attacking the only powerful ally” it has left. He lashed out at members of the Israeli government, warning them that “Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”

Vance said he plans to travel to Switzerland for talks on the Iran deal, but he doesn’t know when that will happen.

“We think these technical negotiations are going to start sometime this weekend. That’s still the plan, but that could change,” he said.

Vance had been expected to lead talks on implementing the agreement with Iran aimed at diluting its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and restarting oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

On Tuesday, two oil tankers left Iran and crossed the U.S. military blockade without being stopped. A merchant shipping tracking website said the ships were carrying a combined total of 3.8 million barrels of Iranian crude oil.

Meanwhile, Iranian state media said that shipping has “normalized” at Iran’s southern ports but added that the Strait of Hormuz remains supervised and under the control of the Iranian military and transiting through the vital waterway still requires coordination.

Much of the agreement would restore the status quo before the war, including ending hostilities, restarting talks between the U.S. and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial passage for the world’s oil and natural gas whose closure created a historic energy crisis.

Major shipowners have begun moving vessels through the waterway since the agreement was signed on Wednesday, according to maritime data company Lloyd’s List Intelligence – though they did not give data on how many ships have passed through the strait as of Thursday.

In a media briefing, Richard Meade, editor in chief of Lloyd’s List, said for the first time in 110 days, ships owned by major companies are transiting the strait after effectively being marooned there since February.

Tankers controlled by major ship owners Grimaldi Group, Cosco, Knutsen and NYK have passed through the strait. And two Iran-flagged, National Iranian Tanker Company-owned, sanctioned crude oil tankers have entered the strait, according to Lloyd’s List.

Phillip Belcher, marine director of Intertanko, a trade group for global independent tanker owners, said the main central route of the Strait of Hormuz is still closed and has an estimated 80 mines that need to be cleared.

But ships have been passing through the smaller Northern route, which goes through Iranian waters, and the Southern route, which goes through Omani waters.

The agreement calls for a permanent end to hostilities and starts a 60-day negotiating clock to reach a final deal on the future of Iran’s nuclear program, though Trump left the door open to resume attacks. It appears to offer Iran several benefits up front while extracting little in return.

It states that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium must, at a minimum, be diluted under international supervision. It also states that Iran shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons – a commitment it has made previously. But beyond stating that the U.S. and Iran will negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program, other commitments still need to be worked out.

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The European Union is considering a fundamental change to its trade policy with China amid a widening trade deficit, rising dependence on strategic sectors and growing pressure from China’s state-sponsored production model on European industry.

China, the world’s largest manufacturing hub, is boosting its outreach in global markets through state-sponsored industrial policies as it rapidly expands production capacity in many fields, especially electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, critical raw materials and high-tech products, putting pressure on Europe’s competitiveness.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said at the G-7 summit in Canada that the EU’s trade with China is unsustainable.

She said the EU needs to grow its production capacity, expand its network of free trade agreements around the world and diversify supply chains, especially because critical minerals and raw materials are concentrated in China, urging the bloc to avoid heavy reliance on a single supplier.

China’s dominance in global trade will be among the topics discussed during an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.

The European Commission emphasized that economic relations with China should continue through risk mitigation, but current trade and investment relations between the bloc and the country are deemed unsustainable.

High-level consultations in Brussels showed that economic and security threats can no longer be assessed separately, prompting more comprehensive and coordinated policies toward China, including new tariffs, import quotas, supply chain diversification requirements and new defensive tools against economic risks emerging from the world’s manufacturing hub.

Last year marked a turning point for the EU in its trade with China, as all member states recorded a trade deficit with the country for the first time.

The EU’s imports from China reached 559.4 billion euros ($695.3 billion) in 2025, while its exports totaled $231.5 billion, marking a record high trade deficit of $417.4 billion, according to data from Eurostat.

Competition in EVs, solar panels, machinery

Intense competition from China in electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries, steel, chemicals and machinery is placing massive pressure on European manufacturers, prompting Brussels to view the impact of cheap, state-sponsored Chinese products on the European market as not only a commercial issue but also a strategic one.

The London-based Center for European Reform reported that Germany faces a serious deindustrialization risk amid China’s growing capacity, warning that Chinese firms are grabbing market share from German producers in their domestic markets, in third countries outside Europe and directly in Europe.

Reports show China could account for around 40% of the world’s industrial production by 2030, putting severe pressure on Europe’s production, research and development, or R&D, and innovation capacities.

Mechanisms to counter China

The EU is working on new mechanisms to combat this. The commission is discussing launching broad safeguard investigations into specific sectors, developing new tools to counter excessive production from China in strategic areas and implementing sector-specific safeguard measures.

Some proposals by France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Lithuania go beyond current anti-dumping processes and would impose direct, blanket customs tariffs on specific sectors instead of relying on lengthy investigations.

One of the most notable regulations the bloc is working on would mandate the diversification of supply chains for critical products to prevent European firms from sourcing resources such as chips, rare earth elements and critical industrial inputs from a single country or supplier.

The proposal would require companies to maintain at least three different sources and would place an upper limit on the share of any single supplier in the total supply.

Maros Sefcovic, the EU commissioner for trade, proposed the diversification tool to prevent potential supply disruptions, especially in semiconductors and critical raw materials.

The diversification strategy involves additional costs for firms but should be viewed as an insurance premium because the costs of supply disruptions could be much higher, according to the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, or ZEW.

Another option is a new mechanism to preserve the bloc’s resilience, allowing the direct imposition of additional customs duties and import quotas when market-distorting practices threaten the bloc’s economic security. The legal basis is expected to rest on national security exceptions under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules.

The EU’s hardening stance toward China is due to concerns over strategic dependence and its growing trade deficit. Beijing’s export restrictions on rare earth elements, magnets and other critical technologies have raised concerns in Europe.

Brussels does not want to see a repeat of the energy crisis that followed the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, but there is still no complete consensus within the bloc on imposing very strict trade measures against China.

Some countries, led by France, are calling for stronger tariffs, while Germany and Spain have adopted a more cautious approach because of their close economic ties to China.

The general trend in the bloc is moving toward reducing dependencies and preserving competitiveness rather than completely severing ties with China.

The new trade defense tools under discussion at this week’s summits will shape the future of economic relations between Brussels and Beijing.

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Total housing sales across Türkiye fell by 31.2% year-over-year in May, reaching 93,333 units, official data showed on Thursday, marking the sharpest decline since December 2023.

Sales had reached the year’s peak in April with 126,000 units sold.

The decline in housing sales was largely influenced by the reduced number of working days due to the Eid holiday period.

The number of newly built (first-hand) homes sold across Türkiye in May fell by 27.9% compared to the same month of the previous year, totaling 30,196 units, the data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) showed.

Second-hand home sales, meanwhile, decreased by 32.7% year-over-year, totaling 63,137 units.

Mortgage-backed housing sales decreased by 2.8% in May compared to the same month last year, totaling 19,754 units. Other housing sales (non-mortgage sales) fell by 36.2% year-over-year to 73,579 units.

The data also showed that a decline in sales to foreign nationals extended in May, as they decreased by 27.0% compared to the same month last year, totaling 1,387 units.

Sales to foreigners represented 1.5% of all housing sales in May.

During the January-May period, sales to foreigners declined by 15.1% year-over-year and stood at 7,068 units.

In May, the highest number of homes sold by nationality were to Russian citizens (268 units), Iranian citizens (125 units), and Ukrainian citizens (88 units).

Similarly, sales of commercial properties fell by 30.9% to 11,434 units last month.

Across Türkiye, new commercial property sales in May decreased by 24.8% year-over-year to 3,255 units.

Second-hand commercial property sales declined by 33.1% over the same period, totaling 8,179 units.

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After Brexit suddenly halted British cheesemaker Michael Harte’s plans to export his products across Europe, it took four years before his young company, Bridge Cheese, managed to find international buyers again, for its cheddar and mozzarella cheeses – this time in distant Hong Kong.

Harte had banked on a “soft Brexit” that kept frictionless trade after Britain’s shock decision on June 23, 2016, to leave the European Union, he said. Instead, the world’s fifth-biggest economy left the common market completely, putting up barriers to the giant on its doorstep.

From its base in Telford, central ⁠U.K. – a town best known as the birthplace of the 18th-century Industrial Revolution that helped spread the idea of open ⁠economies around the globe – Bridge Cheese’s pivot to Asia is now bearing fruit.

This year, it expects to sell more than double the volume of processed cheese to Hong Kong than the annual 100,000 tons it used to send to Europe. Harte hopes to start exports to Malaysia this year and is seeking approvals in Vietnam, Thailand and mainland China and other markets.

But between shortly after the Brexit barriers went up and late 2025, Bridge Cheese had booked no overseas ​sales at all, relying instead on slowing domestic growth to keep the business going.

Harte has no doubt his company’s growth would have been much stronger if the U.K. could still trade freely ​with its neighbors.

Before ⁠Brexit, “you could make a pallet of cheese here on a Monday and have it with the customer in France or Ireland by Wednesday,” Harte said, recalling plans he had to expand rapidly into Spain and Italy.

He abandoned sales to the continent six months after a post-Brexit trade deal was implemented in 2021 because of the new costs of doing business – including mandatory veterinary checks costing 500 pounds ($670) per inspection – as well as reams of customs paperwork and border delays, which increased lead times.

“We just weren’t competitive,” said Harte.

Now, it costs his firm the same for veterinary certification of a 40-foot container carrying 16,800 kilograms of cheese to Asia as it would do for just two pallets totaling 1,200 kilograms sent to the EU, Harte said. And the paperwork is less onerous.

Like Bridge Cheese, which has an annual turnover of around 35 million pounds, thousands of British companies have been forced to find ways to compensate for the loss of free access to their main foreign market, with food producers among the hardest hit.

Although the EU remains the U.K.’s biggest trading partner, a range of manufacturers have felt the impact, adding to the list of problems facing the economy, which has been stuck in a slow-growth rut since the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

“Make an economy less open, and it will restrict growth, though over a longer time trade will adjust and rebuild,” Bank of England (BoE) Governor Andrew Bailey said last October.

So far, that rebuild has proven tentative.

U.K. food exports to EU plummet

Volumes of U.K. food exports to the bloc were down by more than 23% between 2021 and 2025 compared with the five years before Brexit, according to the Food and Drink Federation.

By 2024, around 20,000 small firms, among them food producers, had stopped exporting goods to the EU, reducing the total to around 100,000, according to a report by the London School of Economics’ Centre ⁠for Economic Performance.

Britain’s ⁠post-Brexit trade deals with countries such as Australia and India will replace just a fraction of these lost exports. As well as the hit to trade, Brexit has created years of uncertainty for businesses, reducing investment.

Britain’s overall economy will be 4% smaller 15 years after Brexit than if the country had stayed in the EU, with around half the damage done already, the government’s budget forecasters have estimated.

Based on Britain’s 3 trillion pounds of gross domestic product in 2025, that would be equivalent to 120 billion pounds lopped off the economy.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, a U.S. think tank, predicts even heavier damage, saying Brexit will reduce the size of the economy by between 6% and 8%, with investment, which is crucial for future economic growth, down by 18% compared with a no-Brexit scenario.

Economists who supported Brexit – who were in the minority at the time of the referendum – challenge the estimates.

They argue that the remarkable performance of the U.S. economy in the NBER’s analysis – which compares Britain with a basket of other countries including the U.S. – exaggerates the Brexit effect. The real culprits for the economic malaise, they say, are higher taxes, more regulation and sky-high power bills.

They point out that Britain’s overall economic performance in recent years has been roughly in line with that of France and better than Germany’s, arguing that London should pursue further bilateral trade deals, especially those which help the country’s big services sector.

The red tape, delays and administrative costs of Brexit have also impacted the cost of the food Britain imports, a contributor to ⁠inflation, which has been the highest in the G-7 for much of the past four years, fueled in part by the drop in the value of sterling after the referendum.

Northern Ireland exporters fare better

When policymakers wonder about how the U.K. economy might have fared without Brexit, some look across the Irish Sea.

Northern Ireland, a constituent part of the United Kingdom which shares a land mass with the Republic of Ireland, has been allowed to keep free access to its southern neighbor and the rest of the EU’s single market, thanks to arrangements designed to protect the peace deal that ended decades of armed ​conflict.

That access is vital for businesses and entrepreneurs such as Mike Thomson, another cheese-maker near Belfast.

He said it represented “the best Brexit outcome we could have hoped for,” even if red tape for ingredients shipped over from the U.K. has added costs for his craft dairy, ​Mike’s Fancy Cheese.

His biggest single client is located across the border, in Dublin.

Northern Ireland’s Brexit carve-out helped it to outgrow the rest of the U.K. In 2023 – the most recent year for which such data is available – the Northern Irish economy was 16.5% larger than in 2015, making it the best-performing part of the U.K.

England’s economy grew by 11.6%, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

In 2024, more than a quarter of Northern Ireland’s goods and service exports ⁠went to the Republic of Ireland, up ‌from 14% in 2015.

U.K.-EU reset

British Prime ‌Minister Keir Starmer is trying to ease the friction and an EU-U.K. summit has been set for July 22 to seal a deal to slash veterinary checks from mid-2027, although ⁠EU sources have said progress has been slow.

Harte said Bridge Cheese would be keen to export to the EU again if conditions were right and Britain aligned ‌with its rules on human, animal and plant life trade, giving EU buyers more confidence: “If it improves our competitiveness, brilliant.”

But for many companies bruised by Brexit and other economic shocks in recent years, a sense of uncertainty and caution is unlikely to be lifted much by a U.K.-EU reset on food safety standards.

Business investment in Britain has been weak ​since the turn of the millennium, and as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), it has been ⁠the lowest among the G-7 economies since shortly before the Brexit vote.

Economists point to a range of likely causes, including tax changes and poor management, but Brexit – and the political volatility it has ⁠spawned with six different prime ministers in Downing Street since 2016 – hangs heavily over many employers.

Starmer himself is likely to face a challenge from within the governing Labor Party in the coming months.

Thomson, the cheese-maker in Northern Ireland, said the uncertainty meant he ⁠would not be investing to expand sales to the EU, even ​with his largely hassle-free access.

Reform UK, the party of Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, is riding high in opinion polls. At the same time, one of the possible contenders to replace Starmer from within the Labor Party, former health minister Wes Streeting, has called for Britain to rejoin the EU one day.

“Brexit is not a thing that has happened and is done,” Thomson said. “It’s not something you can plan around because you just don’t know how it’s going to be resolved.”