Nearly 100 German Companies Take Part in New Online Meeting with Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar

BERLIN, 26 August 2020 – Today an additional online videoconference took place with the participation of the Deputy Prime Minister of Kazakhstan, Roman Sklyar, and the heads of German companies. The event, which was traditionally organized by the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Germany, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry’s Committee on Investments, and KazakhInvest, with the support of the German Eastern Business Committee, was dedicated to expanding Kazakh-German cooperation in the spheres of subsoil use and geology. Activities in these spheres are currently carried out within the Intergovernmental Agreement on “Partnership in the Spheres of Raw Materials, Industry and Technology Spheres between Kazakhstan and Germany”, signed on 8 February 2012 during the visit of the First President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to Germany.

The online-meeting was attended by executives and representatives of nearly 100 leading German companies, including Volkswagen, Siemens, Linde, Schaeffler, Knauf, Lufthansa, SMS Group, DMT, and others.

Kazakhstan was represented at the level of vice ministers for infrastructure and industrial development Mr. R.Baymishev, ecology, geology and natural resources Mr. S.Brekesheva. Furthermore, regional investment potential in the mining and metallurgical spheres was presented by the deputy governors of the Pavlodar and Karaganda regions, Mr. S.Shayakhmetov and Mr. A.Abdykadyrov, respectively. Also in attendance was the management of the Kazakh Foreign Ministry’s Committee on Investments and the KazakhInvest national company.

In his remarks Deputy Prime Minister Sklyar briefed the participants about the Kazakh Government’s reforms in the sphere of geology and subsoil use, aimed at increasing competitiveness, creating market conditions for investors, and raising the sector’s professional and technological backbone. He also underscored that Kazakhstan’s post-crisis development strategy will pay particular attention to economic diversification and the creation of new industrial production facilities on the basis of an already-existing sizable resource base

Germany’s Deputy Director General of the Federal Ministry of Economic and Technology, responsible for advancing his Government’s raw materials cooperation, emphasized the importance of developing a comprehensive trade and investment approach to Kazakh-German cooperation. At the same time he underscored that Kazakhstan is Germany’s main partner in the Central Asian region.

During the online meeting an executive from the Federation of German Industries, Mr. Matthias Wachter, the Executive Director of “Hermann Paus Maschinenfabrik GmbH” Franz-Joseph Paus, and the head of the EBRD’s Kazakhstan Office, Mr. Agris Preimanis, paid particular attention to the perspectives for developing the mining and metallurgical spheres in general, their potential vis-à-vis bilateral relations development and the implementation of joint projects and their financing.

The online discussion also served to draw the attention of German companies to the Kazakh Government’s 2021-2025 State Program for Geological Exploration during, which will be adopted in the near future.

At the conclusion of the web conference the participants engaged in a question and answer session, during which they addressed questions concerning the trade and economic contacts, as well as practical matters on the bilateral agenda, and agreed to continue holding regular meetings in this format.