Turkey's Borsa Istanbul up at open

By Gokhan Ergocun

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey's stock exchange dropped 0.60 percent, or 689.85 points, to open at 115,534.41 points on Friday.

On the last transaction day of the week, the banking and holding sector indices rose 0.64 percent and 0.56 percent, respectively.

While all sector indices started the day on the rise, the food beverage sector index posted the best performance, up 2.13 percent.

On Thursday, Borsa Istanbul's BIST 100 closed at 114,844.56, up 0.63 percent, or 715.26 points, with a 6.2-billion-Turkish lira ($1.55 billion) trade volume.

The U.S. dollar/Turkish lira exchange dropped to 3.9520 as of 9.30 a.m. local time (0630GMT) on Friday. It was 3.9680 at Wednesday's close.

The euro/lira exchange rate also decreased to 4.8720 on Friday, compared to 4.8950 at the previous close.

Turkey's exports rose by 9 percent to reach $13.18 billion while its imports increased 19.7 percent to $18.94 billion year-on-year in February, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) announced on Friday.

The country's foreign trade deficit jumped 54.2 percent to$5.76 billion in February, compared to the same month of 2017.

Turkey's GDP rose by 7.4 percent in 2017, from the previous year, and 7.3 percent in the last quarter of the year, TurkStat released on Thursday.