How Turkey's Competition Authority Rewrote Its Playbook in 2025
April 2026 | Başaran Law Firm
Introduction
A drop in enforcement cases normally signals a quieter regulator. At the Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), it signals the opposite.
The TCA's 2025 Annual Report, read alongside its 2024 edition, shows a deliberate transition: fewer investigations, sharper focus, record-breaking fines, and an institutional posture that is increasingly difficult for any market participant to ignore. The headline numbers tell one story. The structure beneath them tells a more consequential one.
1. The Numbers That Mislead — and the Ones That Don't
Total decisions reached 530 in 2025, up 9% from 487 in 2024 — steady, unspectacular growth. But composition is everything.
Competition infringement decisions fell from 166 to 104 — a 37% reduction. By that measure alone, 2025 looks like a year of regulatory restraint. It is not. Total administrative monetary fines rose from TRY 7.5 billion to TRY 12.1 billion — a 61% increase and the highest penalty figure in the TCA's institutional history.
The implication is structural, not cyclical. The TCA is concentrating investigative resources on fewer, larger, and more complex cases. The average weight of an infringement file has increased materially. Businesses that track only case volume as a proxy for enforcement risk are measuring the wrong variable.
Meanwhile, merger and acquisition notifications surged from 311 to 416 — a 34% year-on-year increase, representing 78% of all decisions in 2025 versus 64% in 2024. The authority's workload has fundamentally shifted: the TCA now operates as much as a transaction regulator as an enforcement body.
2. The Dawn Raid Paradox
The sharpest operational signal in the 2025 report is the divergence between completed investigations and on-site examination activity. Completed formal investigations (soruşturma) fell from 49 to 44. Preliminary investigations (ön araştırma) dropped more sharply still, from 27 to 15. Yet on-site examinations — the TCA's unannounced inspections of company premises — rose from 1,039 to 1,509 assignments.
That is not a contradiction. It is a methodology.
The TCA is deploying field resources earlier and more aggressively, building evidentiary foundations before proceedings are formally opened. Digital forensic capacity is central to this shift: the 2025 report documents increased recovery of communications from messaging applications — including encrypted and allegedly deleted exchanges — as primary evidence in cartel proceedings.
A corresponding trend is the rise in obstruction penalties under Article 16/1-d of Law No. 4054, which targets the impediment of on-site examinations — including device access refusals and message deletion in the moments before inspectors arrive. The penalty reaches 0.5% of annual turnover per incident. Companies that treat an inspection notification as an opportunity to sanitise devices are now facing a secondary enforcement action alongside any substantive finding.
The practical message for compliance officers is unambiguous: document retention protocols and device management procedures must be embedded before an inspector arrives, not improvised after.
3. Sectoral Reorientation: From Platforms to Pantries — and Building Sites
In 2024, digital platforms dominated the enforcement landscape. The largest penalty tranche — approximately TRY 4.0 billion — fell on the information technology and platform services sector, predominantly under Article 6 of Law No. 4054 governing abuse of dominant position (hâkim durumun kötüye kullanılması).
In 2025, the regulatory centre of gravity shifted decisively. The food industry absorbed TRY 6.8 billion in fines — the single largest sectoral figure in either year, up from TRY 2.6 billion in 2024. Construction jumped from TRY 658.4 million to TRY 4.0 billion. Infrastructure services rose from TRY 83.2 million to TRY 737.6 million. Chemicals and mining climbed from TRY 234.8 million to TRY 731.7 million. Labour market violations — covering no-poach agreements (çalışan ayartmama sözleşmeleri) and wage-fixing arrangements — reached TRY 1.1 billion, up from TRY 856.3 million in 2024.
This reorientation tracks macroeconomic context with precision. The TCA has consistently signalled that inflationary environments heighten scrutiny of price coordination in essential goods, particularly where anticompetitive conduct directly affects household purchasing power. The food sector's enforcement trajectory is not coincidental — it reflects a deliberate prioritisation framework applied under Articles 4 and 6 of Law No. 4054.
For platform and technology businesses: enforcement did not recede. The IT and platform services sector retained approximately TRY 4.3 billion in penalties in 2025 — broadly stable year-on-year — and led both in M&A volume (84 transactions) and completed investigations (5 cases). The digital sector remains under permanent structural scrutiny; it has been joined by others, not displaced.
Examining infringement type, the picture confirms a shift in complexity. Article 4 decisions (anticompetitive agreements, concerted practices, and decisions of associations) fell from 148 to 82, while Article 6 decisions (abuse of dominant position) held steady at 13 to 14. Mixed cases — files raising both Article 4 and Article 6 concerns simultaneously — rose from 5 to 8, signalling a growing proportion of complex, interlocking infringement structures.
4. Merger Control: Volume Up, Scrutiny Sharper
The 416 transactions notified to the TCA in 2025 represent a record. Of these, 381 received unconditional clearance, 10 were conditionally approved subject to remedies — up from 8 in 2024 — and 25 were found outside jurisdictional thresholds. No transaction was prohibited.
The conditional clearance figure carries disproportionate interpretive weight. The TCA is demonstrating increasing willingness to clear complex transactions subject to structural divestitures or behavioural commitments, rather than block outright. The commitment mechanism (taahhüt) is functioning as a genuine dealmaking tool — provided engagement is early and proposed remedies are substantively credible.
Under the Significant Impediment to Effective Competition (SIEC) standard (Etkin Rekabetin Önemli Ölçüde Azaltılması testi), the TCA's review practice shows heightened sensitivity to innovation competition and the foreclosure of potential entrants — not only static market share thresholds. M&A counsel advising on Turkish filings should anticipate substantive analytical engagement in concentrated or vertically integrated markets, even where nominal market shares appear unproblematic.
Sector leadership in transaction volume remains with IT and platforms (84 transactions), followed by automotive and vehicles (44 — nearly double 2024's figure), chemicals and mining (42), and healthcare services (38). Forestry and wood products entered the top ten for the first time in 2025 with 14 transactions, illustrating the breadth of consolidation activity reaching the TCA's desk.
5. The Structural Shifts That Will Define 2026
Three institutional developments in the 2025 report carry forward-looking significance that exceeds their current footprint.
Algorithmic enforcement is now operational. The TCA launched AI-assisted market anomaly detection and algorithmic coordination identification as pilot projects in 2024. The 2025 report confirms these tools are integrated into decision-making processes. Tacit collusion — where competing pricing algorithms converge without any direct human communication — is the authority's identified frontier risk. Businesses using dynamic pricing tools must treat algorithmic governance as a compliance obligation, not a theoretical exposure.
Labour market enforcement has become structural. No-poach agreements and wage-fixing arrangements have generated enforcement actions across industries as diverse as ready-mixed concrete, streaming production, technology, and pharmaceuticals. The 2025 cumulative figure of TRY 1.1 billion in labour market fines represents a disciplined, multi-year enforcement programme, not a single exceptional decision. Human resources policy, compensation benchmarking, and recruitment restriction clauses now fall squarely within competition compliance perimeters.
The settlement and commitment architecture is maturing. The 2025 report explicitly confirms that both the settlement procedure (uzlaşma) under Article 43 of Law No. 4054 and the commitment mechanism are being "effectively operated" — language notably stronger than the 2024 report's treatment of these tools. Combined with the rise in conditional merger clearances, the TCA's posture has shifted meaningfully: from enforcement-led outcomes toward structural resolution. This represents both a procedural opportunity for parties under investigation and a heightened premium on early, credible engagement with the authority.
Forward Look: The 2025 Annual Report does not read as a consolidation document. It reads as a foundation document for a more technologically capable, sectorally diversified, and structurally sophisticated authority. The TCA enters 2026 with record fine levels, AI-assisted surveillance deployed operationally, expanded dawn raid capacity, and an enforcement perimeter that now reaches deep into labour markets, construction, infrastructure, and food supply chains.
For legal and compliance teams, the strategic implication is straightforward: the question is no longer whether the TCA will arrive, but whether your organisation is ready when it does.
*This publication is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice.