NOV. 6 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev promoted the deputy chief of the presidential staff, Bakhyt Sultanov, to finance minister as part of a cabinet reshuffle. Mr Sultanov, 42, replaces Bolat Zhamishev who moves on to become regional development minister, considered an important role in Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 160, published on Nov. 13 2013)
NOV. 10 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Battered German cars once dominated the streets of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. They were old and rusting but still powerful and reliable.
Crucially, too, it was cheaper to buy a second-hand car in Europe and drive it to Kazakhstan than to buy a new one made at a Kazakh factory.
That’s now changed.
When Kazakhstan entered the Customs Union it slapped an import tax on second-hand cars from Europe. The main beneficiary of this has been Russia’s AvtoVaz which makes the Lada brand of car.
It’s now cheaper to buy a Lada from Russia or a car made in Kazakhstan than it is to import a second-hand banger from Europe.
Figures released last week by the Association of Kazakhstan Auto dealers showed that Lada made up 35% of new car sales out of the 117,000 sold in the first nine months of the year. This is already five times more than the number sold in the whole of 2010.
And more and more cars are being made in Kazakhstan. AvtoVaz owns a 25 percent stake in Azyia Avto, a Kazakh carmaker and it now plans to open a factory building Ladas in Ust Kamenogorsk by 2016.
But shifting Russian manufacturing to Kazakhstan could have far-reaching consequences, said Vsevolod Samokhvalov, a researcher and analyst at Cambridge University.
“It will lock the country (Kazakhstan) into the disadvantaged low added-value part of the post-Soviet production chain,” he said.
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(News report from Issue No. 160, published on Nov. 13 2013)
OCT. 31 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan wants to turn itself into a regional centre for Islamic finance, various Kazakh officials said at a conference in London. Islamic finance is becoming an increasingly popular way of branding banks.
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)
NOV. 1 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Tethys Petroleum, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, sold half of its Kazakh assets to China’s SinoHan Oil for $75m. China has been rapidly buying up energy assets in Kazakhstan. SinoHan Oil is a fully-owned subsidiary of HanHong. Tethys has operations across Central Asia and in Georgia..
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)
OCT. 31 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Underlining Kazakhstan’s links with NATO countries, Kazakh defence minister Adilbek Dzhaksybekov flew to London for talks with his British counterpart Philip Hammond. Kazakhstan wants British advice on how to professionalise its military. Earlier this year the Kazakh government announced that it would end conscription.
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)
NOV. 4 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Kazakhstan will harvest up to 19m tonnes of grain this year, a 50% rise from 2012, media quoted deputy agriculture minister Muslim Umiryaev as saying. Over the past decade Kazakhstan has turned itself into a major grain exporter. It has become an important part of the economy.
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)
NOV. 6 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The suicide rate in Kazakhstan is growing, it is almost double the global average according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), worrying parliamentarians.
The starkest statistic is in youth suicides which have been creeping up. Suicides by people under the age of 22 make up roughly a third of all suicides in Kazakhstan, according to Kazakh government statistics.
In WHO’s, rather morbid, global league table, Kazakhstan sits in the top five for most suicides per 100,000 people with roughly 25 every year. Russia, by comparison, has 20 suicides per 100,000 people every year.
Media outlets and government officials blame new technologies and the abandonment of traditional Kazakh family values, the growing pains of an expanding economy, for the high suicide rate.
Parliamentarians, though, have another theory.
They have blamed the foreign punk culture and the melancholic, Goth-like emo sub-culture for the rise in suicides and called for symbols such as guns and skull and cross bones to be banned in schools.
At a university canteen in Almaty, though, this theory was rubbished by a group of students.
“I know a couple of them that just wanted to show around the marks on their wrists,” Azamat, one of the students, said of teenagers following the emo fashion. “They don’t want to kill themselves.”
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)
NOV. 5 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Nine Kazakh weightlifters have tested positive for doping, media quoted the International Weightlifting Federations (IWF) as saying. The findings are an embarrassment to Kazakhstan which wants to promote its prowess in the sport. At the 2012 Olympics, Kazakhstan won four gold medals in weightlifting.
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)
OCT. 31 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — At a conference in London, Kazakh officials were eager to talk about plans to turn Kazakhstan into a centre for Islamic finance.
Islamic finance is the term used to define investments made, basically, with Islamic principles in mind. It’s a fluid concept but one that has picked up advocates in the Muslim world over the past few years. Kazakhstan though, has been a bit slow off the mark.
Although nominally a secular country, most people in Kazakhstan are Muslim and it has a fairly developed banking sector in Almaty.
Last year, the Kazakhstan Development Bank issued a $75.5m Islamic bond in Malaysia, which has become something of a centre for Islamic finance.
That, though, appears to have been just the start.
Now Asset Issekeshev, the Kazakh minister for new technology, has said Kazakhstan wants to join the International Islamic Financial Market (IIFM), a global watchdog for Islamic finance.
Yerlan Baidaulet, a Kazakh board member at Jeddah-based bank Islamic Development Bank (IDB), went further though. He said now that Kazakhstan had a new head of its Central Bank, Islamic finance would really take off.
Mr Baidaulet told Reuters at the conference that IDB was introducing an Islamic bank and a leasing company in Kazakhstan next year.
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)
NOV. 4 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — The volume of cashless transactions in Kazakhstan increased by 25% in the year to the end of September, the Kazakh Central Bank said. This shows that Kazakh consumers are becoming more sophisticated and comfortable with using debit and credit cards. Cashless transactions account for roughly 15% of all purchases.
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(News report from Issue No. 159, published on Nov. 6 2013)