Çetin Yılmaz

Çetin Yılmaz is currently working at Unilever as Senior Corporate Affairs Manager. His job is to develop, coordinate, and implement engagement strategies with the Government, NGOs, trade associations, chambers of commerce and other external stakeholders to support Unilever’s public and sustainability policy goals. He also provides expertise for a better understanding of the political & economy policies and policy-making processes in Türkiye by monitoring and analyzing them and reporting their business implications to the corporate leadership teams. 

Before he joined Unilever, he had 26 years of professional experience in the Turkish Government. He worked in the Undersecretariat of Prime Ministry for Foreign Trade, Ministry of Economy, and Ministry of Trade respectively as a Senior International Trade Specialist and then Head of Department. He specialized on free movement of goods between Türkiye and the EU; particularly in the transposing of the EU’s horizontal directives and regulations into the Turkish legal order on product safety, recalls, market surveillance, conformity assessment, mutual recognition and technical barriers to trade. Besides, He was in charge of coordinating the transposition works of the EU’s sectoral directives & regulations carried out by different Turkish Ministries and public authorities. He had also assignments at the Turkish Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria (2006-2009) and at the Turkish Consulate in Odessa, Ukraine (2014-2018) as a Commercial Counsellor.  

He has a bachelor’s degree on International Relations at Faculty of Political Sciences of the Ankara University in 1994 and a master degree of International Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs of the Columbia University, New York City (USA) in 2002. He majored in International Finance and Economic Policy.

He knows English very well and Italian at beginner-medium level.