Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service with me, Victoria Craig. Today, I'm taking you to Manisa, a city on Turkey's West Coast. It's one of the country's manufacturing centers for home appliances like washers, dryers, and refrigerators. But soon, thanks to a $1 billion investment deal, it will also be a local factory hub for China's BYD, the world's second biggest maker of electric vehicles.

This young worker told me that when a multinational company like this settles in his town, it tends to be a tide

that lifts all boats, pushing up salaries and overall worker welfare. News of BYD's investment has

sent excitement not just through the local community, but the upper echelons of government, which is

desperate for international investment as President Rejep Tyip Erdogan continues to try to write

Turkey's economic ship. So we're now seeing him touch the untouchable, China. I think that it is

a signal to the West. I have other alternatives, but I think it also comes from some degree of economic desperation.

This deal has provided a roadmap for boosting local prosperity, improving national economics,

and potentially rearranging global geopolitics.

So buckle up. In this edition of Business Daily, we're hitting the road

and unpacking all the vital components of this grant investment plan.

It's a blisteringly hot summer afternoon when we pull into Manisa. It's a roughly hours drive away from Izmir, one of Turkey's most important

port cities. The city center blends landmarks from the Ottoman Empire with sleek modern architecture,

while hundreds of factories that help drive Turkey's economy hum away in the foothills of the

province's green mountains. It's Manisa's industrial know-how and proximity to European transportation links

that China's BYD is trying to leverage with a new $1 billion factory here.

And it's the prospect of greater economic prosperity through that massive investment

that has workers in this city buzzing about the news.

My producer, Gonja, and I duck into a tea shop for an ice-cold bottle of water,

and we find two young factory workers enjoying their own break over glasses of hot Turkish tea.

One of them, Yassin, tells me that these kinds of investments in Manisa from multinational

companies of all kinds, including Bosch, Beko, and Mitsubishi, have a positive effect on everyone

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