APRIL 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan’s GDP shrank by 3.5% in the first quarter of the year to 12b manat ($7.95b), the Statistics Committee said. A fall in industrial production and flat oil production have worsened Azerbaijan’s overall economic performance, according to the government.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Harich, a small village in north western Armenia, renamed a street previously dedicated to Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in retaliation for his perceived support for Azerbaijan over Armenia in the neighbours’ row over Nagorno-Karabakh. Earlier this month the most serious fighting in two decades broke out between Armenia-backed fighters and Azerbaijan around Nagorno-Karabakh.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 21 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – The UN Human Rights Council urged Kyrgyzstan authorities to release Azimzhan Askarov, a political activist arrested in 2010. In July 2015, the US government described Mr Askarov as a political prisoner and awarded him a special human rights award. This sparked an angry reaction from the Kyrgyz government and damaged Kyrgyzstan-US relations.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
ALMATY, APRIL 21 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — CNPC, China’s state owned energy company, said the Kashagan oil project will re-start production in June 2017, six months later than the Kazakh government has said it expects a restart.
At a press conference in Moscow, Wang Zhongcai, a vice-president at CNPC, said a launch, by the middle of 2017, was “likely,” Reuters news agency reported.
Just last week, Sauat Mynbayev, head of Kazakhstan’s state-owned Kazmunaigas, said the government forecast production by October and earlier this year, Exxon, which holds a 16.81% stake in the project, had also said it saw commercial production resuming by the end of 2016.
In September 2013, weeks after starting production, the consortium running Kashagan, one of the largest and most complex oil development projects in recent times, was forced to halt operations due to damaged pipelines.
In mid 2013, CNPC bought an 8.33% stake in Kashagan from Kazmunaigas. The share previously belonged to ConocoPhillips.
The other Kashagan shareholders also include Kazmunaigas, Total, Eni, Shell and Japan’s Inpex.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 18 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Uzbek authorities released from prison Shukhrat Nusratov, a former MP who criticised President Islam Karimov in the first few years of Uzbekistan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Mr Nusratov had been jailed for seven years in 2012 for various economic crimes that his supporters said were fabricated.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Azerbaijan is phasing out a programme that funded overseas study for undergraduates in order to save money during an increasing vicious economic downturn.
Mikhail Jabbarov, Azerbaijan’s minister of education, said funding for bachelor level programmes has dried up.
“The ministry is developing a new format of the program, which envisages education at foreign higher educational institutions only for PhD and Master’s Degrees,” Mr Jabbarov told media.
The government’s stated objective is to attract more foreign professors to Azerbaijan to allow undergraduates to receive high-level tuition without having to study abroad.
What the government cannot openly say is that the programme has become unsustainable because of a sharp drop in oil prices that has dragged down its economy.
The ministry of education’s overseas undergraduate programme is one of two channels that Azerbaijani youth can use to access scholarships to study abroad.
SOFAZ, the country’s oil fund, had also established an eight-year programme in 2007 to fund education abroad. But that programme is now being wound up and is unlikely to be extended.
In the first quarter of 2016, SOFAZ said it spent 5m manat ($3.3m) paying fees for Azerbaijanis studying abroad.
Analysts have said that if both programmes were cut, Azerbaijan would, effectively, be isolating itself from the West.
The government has already cut several domestic social projects, including updating broadband internet across the country and investments in care homes, roads and railways, to cut costs.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Rashit Sarsenov, one of Kaza- khstan’s wealthiest men, said that he was the real owner of JP Finance Group, an Almaty-registered company that officially owns 82.8% of Nurbank. Measured by assets, Nurbank is the 15th biggest bank in Kazakhstan. Mr Sarsenov’s sister was previously listed as JP Finance Group’s owner. In November 2015, Mr Sarsenov’s son, Eldar, became the chairman of the bank.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 22 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – International pressure against human rights abuses sometimes works. In a surprise move, Azerbaijan’s authorities allowed Leyla and Arif Yunus, two recently-freed human rights activists, to leave the country. Worsening health had been the authorities’ reason to free the Yunuses at the end of last year. But they still faced a suspended sentence and were banned from leaving the country.
Now, effectively, Azerbaijan’s government is giving them a chance to seek both medical treatment and asylum in Europe.
This has to be cheered. It showed that EU and US pressure can work. It also gave Azerbaijan a way out of a difficult stand-off over its clampdown on opposition activists and human rights workers.
Last month, Azerbaijan also released a handful of activists in an amnesty.
But there is still some way to go. Other journalists and opposition activists are still in Azerbaijani prisons.
The public pressure on Azerbaijan and the behind-the-scenes dialogue that no doubt helped the Yunuses to the Netherlands must be maintained.
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(Editorial from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
ALMATY, APRIL 20 2016, (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan’s telecoms sector continues to limp through an economic downturn that has knocked consumer confidence and dented sales.
Kcell, the largest mobile operator, said in quarterly results that its year- on-year revenues fell by 17.7% in Q1 2016 to 35.5b tenge ($107m), its lowest since an IPO in 2012.
Prices have fallen in the ultra competitive Kazakh telecoms sector with Sweden’s Tele2 and Altel undercutting the tariffs of the two dominant companies — Kcell, majority owned by Telia Company, and Russia’s Vimpelcom which trades under the Beeline brand. Telia Company is the rebranded name for TeliaSonera.
Tele2 and Altel completed their long touted merger in February.
A combination of low oil prices and a recession in Russia has triggered an economic downturn in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Consumer spending is down and companies are laying off workers.
Kcell CEO Arti Ots highlighted the impact of the poor economic conditions in a statement alongside the quarterly results.
“As expected the first quarter of the current year has been challenging,” he said.
“We are not seeing any significant signs of a market recovery, but there have been some indications that the intense downward pressure on pricing we have experienced in recent years is starting to ease.”
In Q1, Kcell said it lost 9% of its subscribers. More importantly, perhaps, Kcell said that the average revenue per user fell by 7% despite a strong uptake in data traffic.
In her own quarterly results, Tele2 CEO Allison Kirkby confirmed that the company had grabbed market share and that revenues had grown but also that Kazakhstan’s turbulent economy had dented profits.
“EBITDA [a profit measure] is impacted by both business expansion and the significant devaluation of the Kazakh tenge,” she said (April 21).
The tenge lost 50% of its value against the US dollar last year.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)
APRIL 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) – Turkmenistan increased gas shipments to China by a third in Q1 2016, Chinese state media reported. According to Xinhua news agency, Turkmenistan exported 10.6b cubic metres of gas between Jan and March 2016 via the Central Asia-China pipeline, which runs through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The total annual capacity of the pipeline is 55b cubic metres.
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(News report from Issue No. 277, published on April 22 2016)