In a town built around Türkiye's oldest steelworks, June ended with railway wheels heading to Central Europe. Kardemir, the Karabük iron and steel company that cast the Republic's first Turkish iron in the 1930s, said in a statement reported by Anadolu Ajansı that it exported $7.75 million of railway wheels to European buyers in June, sending $2.25 million and then a further $3 million worth to the Czech Republic and $2.5 million to Bulgaria.
The sums are modest against Türkiye's total steel trade, but the product is the point. Railway wheels are a high-specification item, forged to tolerances and safety standards that European rail operators do not hand out lightly, and Kardemir makes both the rails and the wheels on the same integrated site. That combination, the company said, is what has let it settle in as a supplier to Europe's railways rather than a seller of raw metal.
The exports land in a month when the wider numbers turned up too. Türkiye's crude-steel production rose 8.9% year-on-year in May to 3.4 million tonnes, according to the Türkiye Steel Producers' Association, a figure matched exactly by the World Steel Association's own May report. Over the first five months of the year, output was up 6.8% at 16.5 million tonnes. Türkiye remains one of the world's larger steel producers, and after a soft stretch the mills are running hotter again.
The trade picture is more mixed, and worth stating plainly. Steel-product exports in May were close to flat by volume and slightly down in value, at $914.8 million, and over five months they fell to $4.1 billion, down nearly 5% on the year. The bright spot is composition rather than tonnage: producers like Kardemir are pushing value-added products, the wheels and specialty steels that hold their price, even as commodity-grade exports soften.
Hanging over all of it is a new wall in Brussels. The European Union brought a fresh steel safeguard measure into force in July 2026, tightening the terms on imported steel to shield its own industry, and Turkish producers had feared the worst. The steel association's secretary-general, Veysel Yayan, offered a calmer reading. Thanks to a 1.5-million-tonne free quota set aside for countries with free-trade agreements, he estimated that Türkiye's steel exports to the EU could still exceed 3 million tonnes a year. Yayan was blunter about the other direction, warning that cheap steel from China, Russia and Southeast Asia keeps arriving despite trade measures, and calling for faster action to defend the home market.
The through-line is a familiar one for Turkish industry. Türkiye sits next to the European market, woven into its supply chains, and increasingly competes on quality rather than price alone. Kardemir's wheels, rolling from a Karabük foundry that has been making steel since before most of Europe's current rail fleets existed, are a small, concrete version of that argument.