Recep Tayyip Erdoğan welcomed Pakistan's prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, at Vahdettin Palace on the Bosphorus on Saturday, and the number both sides kept repeating was five.
Five billion dollars, the target their governments have set for annual trade, up from about $1.2 billion last year. Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz called even that modest and said it should go much higher.
Erdoğan received Sharif with a formal ceremony, then the two moved into a closed-door meeting with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın, Communications Director Burhanettin Duran, and chief advisor Akif Çağatay Kılıç. A delegation session and a joint news conference were to follow, according to Anadolu Agency.
The pitch at the business forum across town in Beşiktaş was to turn old affection into invoices. Turkish firms have already put more than $2 billion into Pakistan and finished 74 construction projects there worth about $3.5 billion, Yılmaz said. Trade Minister Ömer Bolat said talks are underway to widen the 2022 goods-trade agreement, in force since May 2023, to cover more products.
Sharif worked the other side of the ledger. Pakistan's state agency, APP, reported that he spent Saturday inviting Turkish companies into Pakistan's energy, mining, ports and technology, in meetings with the heads of Çalık Holding and Albayrak Group and the president of Türkiye's chambers union, TOBB.
One idea on the table is a dedicated zone for Turkish investors inside a Karachi industrial park, which Yılmaz said could give Turkish manufacturers a predictable base for reaching South and Central Asia.
Bolat used the forum to bank Türkiye's own figures. Exports hit $136 billion in the first half of the year, he said, and $278 billion over the past 12 months, the record run reported earlier this week.
Sharif did not arrive from home. He flew in from Tehran, where he had joined the funeral of Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader whose death Tehran blames on US and Israeli strikes, and where he said Pakistan stood with Iran. Ankara has been crediting Islamabad's role as a go-between for Washington and Tehran, and Yılmaz repeated the compliment on Saturday.
For Erdoğan, this was the warm-up. In three days he hosts NATO's leaders in Ankara, where the guest list is longer and much harder to please.