Working trip to Central Asia

Dear friends,

While I was flying home, I wrote a report.

Our week-long working tour of the neighboring countries of Central Asia has ended. In 7 days, we drove almost 2 thousand kilometers, signed contracts for the trial supply of various products for $ 3 million, agreed on the implementation of several cooperative projects and outlined plans for cooperation in a number of areas: agriculture, light industry, IT, mechanical engineering, electric power...

 

But most importantly, our entire delegation, which included officials, representatives of the quasi-public sector, and business, worked as a single team to lay trade routes/corridors.

 

Today I held the final meeting of this trip - negotiations were held with the khokim of Tashkent, Mr. Jahongir Artykhodzhayev. We will go deeper into industrial cooperation: we are working on the implementation of the Sergek project in Tashkent and the opening of the transformer production of our company Alageum Electric.

We agreed to organize business meetings of the two countries more often not only in the capitals, but also in border cities. This will also help to establish tourist ties along the Turkestan-Shymkent-Tashkent-Samarkand-Bukhara line.

And while the tourist route is just being formed, the business and I decided to test our weekly work in practice: in the very near future, an agricultural train-an autocaravan will be formed. Traders will collect requests from the trading networks of Kazakhstan and Russia and accumulate volumes in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the areas where we held negotiations. We will go through all the points of the future ORC of the commodity corridor.

So we will test the regional commodity distribution system being created. Let's see how all the agreements on borders work.

In the last two days alone, I have traveled almost 800 kilometers in the Ferghana region of Uzbekistan and the Sughd region of Tajikistan.

As we have been doing for the past week, we have been looking for direct contacts to fully understand the specifics of pricing in these regions. They visited fields and gardens, bazaars and agro-logistics centers, asked about transport corridors and obstacles on the way to sales markets. There were a lot of meetings with farmers, traders, heads of regions.

A very important point that we discussed: in the logistics centers that will be created along the shipping corridor, it is necessary to provide not just calibration and sorting, but also to solve the issue of organizing the correct packaging. Large retail chains have very strict requirements for containers, without which even a very good product will never get on the shelves.

In one of the ORCS operating in Tajikistan, I saw how peaches are packed for delivery to the Kazakh Magnum: how they are imported, how and where they are cooled, sorted and calibrated, and what they are packed in… In Uzbekistan, the ALC has a good experience in establishing its own production of containers. I looked at how related processing plants are beginning to develop around the ALC. For example, freeze-drying, production of fruit chips, etc. I hope that private business will also catch up to the ORC in Kazakhstan for processing. We will help our farmers, logisticians and traders to learn from this experience.
Under contracts.

Two contracts have been signed in the last two days. The first one is for $500 thousand for the purchase of Uzbek cherries. Moreover, the Kazakh company that signed the contract plans to assemble an enlarged batch of high-quality Uzbek and Kazakh cherries with subsequent delivery to Dubai retail chains. The second contract is for the supply of fruit and vegetable products from the Gafurov district of Sughd region to Kazakhstani retail chains. And also half a million dollars.

As for industrial cooperation with the regions of the two countries, in Kokand, for example, we examined the production base and discussed with the first Deputy Khokim of the Ferghana region, Mr. Avaz Urinboev, our possible cooperation on the assembly of our locomotives. The region also has a great interest in cooperation with Kazakhstan in the development of information technologies.

In Khujand, the khokim, Mr. Rajabboy Ahmadzoda, talked about possible joint projects for cotton processing and in the textile industry. I invited you to participate in the project of the International Center for Trade and Economic Cooperation "Central Asia". It is not for nothing that it is called "Central Asia" - all our countries should take part in it, and then the whole region will feel the benefits.

I believe that the working trip brought both practical results and laid the foundation for new areas of work. I saw a lot, heard a lot and learned a lot of new things. But the main thing is the mutual desire of all countries to work together and solve any problems that arise together.

I repeat, we are not talking only about imports (and we considered exactly the products that are in short supply in our off-season). Local suppliers and logisticians themselves asked to organize the delivery of demanded Kazakh products to them (vegetable and lubricating oils, fertilizers, even wood and coal), so that the equipment would not go back empty.

We will work!