Corum

Corum exports like a port city without having either a port or a railway. TUİK's 2025 figures put the city-only population at 270,361, yet local business leaders say Corum's production-based exports reached $5.5 billion and now sell into more than 130 countries. The surprise is not that this inland Anatolian city makes machines. It is that it learned to make the machines that build other factories, then kept compounding from there.

Officially, Corum is a provincial capital 808 metres above sea level, better known to outsiders for leblebi and nearby Hittite ruins. The economic story is different. The regional development agency describes Corum as a factory city that builds factories and says machinery is the dominant sector, with smart specialization in food-processing equipment. That matters because food machinery becomes an export scaffold: flour and semolina lines, brick and ceramic plants, and foundry equipment train local suppliers in metalworking, components, and after-sales service that can spill into new sectors. Recent local reporting says the city now exports to more than 130 countries and achieved that scale without railway connection to the ports.

That is the Wikipedia gap. Corum's real asset is not any one product but a production habitat dense enough to keep generating adjacent capabilities. The same local coalition that turned chickpea roasting into dozens of flavoured leblebi variants also built machine shops, casting capacity, organized industrial zones, and now a second OSB planned on 280 hectares near the Samsun road. In business terms, Corum keeps reinvesting industrial know-how back into the habitat rather than cashing out into a single commodity identity.

Biologically, Corum behaves like a termite mound. Termites create climate-stable structures that let many specialized tasks happen inside an otherwise harsh environment. Corum does the same through niche construction, resource allocation, and path dependence. Each new machine exporter trains more welders, machinists, suppliers, and financiers; those inputs make the next exporter easier to create. The mound gets more valuable because it was already built.