EXCLUSIVE | Nordex reveals defence strategy against Chinese rivals in key market

While Chinese OEMs so far have only sold a couple of turbines in most of the EU, they seem to have been more successful in some Eastern European fringe markets and Turkey.

The latter is often overlooked, but regularly adds significant volumes of new onshore wind power capacity, making it a key market in the wider European region. Turkey last year, for example, installed 1.3GW on land, ranking behind only Germany and Finland in new installations, but ahead of other core EU countries such as France and Spain.

And Western OEMs have long dominated Turkish wind power installations, with Nordex alone commanding nearly a third of the market.

“We have been in the Turkish market since 2007, and we are the market leader. We have a lot of loyal customers there,” Özarslan said in an interview during the Husum Wind event last month.

But he acknowledges: “The Chinese are trying to get into the Turkish market.”

‘No big concerns’ about Envision

But it was Envision, which scored the greatest breakthrough in Turkey.

Nordex seems relatively unimpressed by the potentially massive deal, though.

“We have no big concerns, even though there has been this MoU [memorandum of understanding] which has been announced by Envision a couple of weeks ago,” Özarslan said.

“There are a lot of local content requirements in Turkey, which the Chinese are not able to fulfil,” he said.

With many years of experience in the Turkish market and local manufacturing already up and running, Nordex is among a few Western OEMs able to fulfil those rules, the CCO explained.

“We have won an auction in Turkey in January with 1.2GW of volume, which we are going to execute in 2026/27,” Özarslan said, meaning that Nordex swept up all volume on offer during Turkey’s latest YEKA RES tender.

“More auctions are coming with a similar local content. One has already been announced by the (energy minister) two weeks ago.”

Thanks, among other things, to local production, Nordex is also able to offer developers rather low prices in Turkey. At the latest YEKA tender, for example, the feed-in tariff (FIT) of the winning bid with Nordex machines came in at a low €33.50 per megawatt hour.

Service network key

Next to local content, the lack of a service network could also hamper Chinese OEMs from making more substantial inroads in a market like Turkey, Özarslan reckons.

“Customers have to take a risk related to Chinese OEM supplies, especially due to the services, because Chinese manufacturers do not have any service organisation or a service network in Turkey similar to many other countries,” he said.

“So, from that perspective, we are quite confident that we will continue our good development in Turkey.”