Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have set up a joint foreign trade company to increase bilateral trade and enter the markets of third countries.
The founders of the export-import enterprise were the QazTrade Trade Policy Development Center and the UzTrade company.
The foreign trade company will focus on conducting market research and competitive analysis of products of large enterprises of the two countries, developing proposals for placing orders for the production of finished goods, optimizing and coordinating mutual trade processes, assisting businesses in certification and promotion of goods for export.
“At the initial stage, we plan to purchase fruit and vegetable products from Uzbekistan to meet the needs of our domestic market. In addition, we will help sell Kazakh flour products in Uzbekistan with the possibility of further export to Afghanistan. We have agreed with the Uzbek side to provide preferences for logistics costs,” said Nuraly Bukeykhanov, Head of the Trade Policy Development Center.
In 2022, trade between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan reached $5 billion, up 29.8% year-on-year ($3.8 billion).
The volume of exports of Kazakhstani goods increased by 33% to $3.7 billion. The growth in exports was mainly due to an increase in supplies of ore and copper concentrate (up 4.8 times), wheat (up 32.3%), cars (up 83.7%), sunflower oil (up 97.2 times), fresh and chilled beef (up 4.1 times), and raw aluminum (up 70.4%).
In 2022, imports to Kazakhstan from Uzbekistan increased by 21.4% to $ 1.3 billion. Kazakhstan mainly buys car bodies, spark-ignition internal combustion engines, grapes, flat-rolled unalloyed steel, lead ores and concentrates, building bricks, floor blocks and similar ceramic products, parts and accessories for cars and tractors, and ethylene polymers.
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Uzbekistan expects the inbound tourist flow into the country to grow by 34% in 2023, said Shukhrat Isakulov, advisor to the director of the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) Silk Road office.
“If in 2016 2.2 million tourists visited Uzbekistan, in 2019 – 6.7 million. Of course, the pandemic has affected tourism, but since last year there is already a steady trend to increase the flow of tourists. Last year 5.2 million tourists visited Uzbekistan. This year, we plan to attract 7 million and exceed pre-pandemic indicators,” he told a press conference on Friday.
The World Bank predicts the growth of the economy of Uzbekistan in 2022 by 5.3%, according to the updated WB economic review for the Europe and Central Asia region.
Earlier in April, the World Bank expected the country’s GDP to grow by 3.6% this year.
“According to forecasts, Uzbekistan’s GDP growth will slow to 5.3% in 2022 (in 2021 the economy grew by 7%) and will be 4.9% in 2023. Increasing difficulties in the field of logistics (supplies) associated with sanctions against Russia, will slow down the growth of private consumption,” the document says.
At the same time, according to the WB, private investment and exports are expected to grow steadily, and the current account balance of payments will improve, as Uzbekistan continues to benefit from high world commodity prices (gold, copper, natural gas) and increased remittances from labor migrants. .
“Foreign direct investment is not expected to increase in 2022, and the trade deficit will be covered primarily by government borrowing,” the review said.
According to the World Bank, higher commodity export revenues and “slow” government investment spending will reduce the budget deficit from 6.2% of GDP in 2021 to 4.4% in 2022. However, the deficit will be higher than planned (at 3%) due to higher government spending on social protection, health care, education and infrastructure development.
The government is expected to continue to adhere to its own borrowing restrictions. Thus, public debt and total external debt will gradually decrease to 32% and 55% of GDP, respectively, by the end of 2024.
The state budget of Uzbekistan for 2022 included GDP growth at the level of 5.9%, the inflation rate was planned to be reduced to 9%.
Earlier, the EBRD raised its growth forecast for the economy of Uzbekistan from 4% to 5.5%. The ADB forecast for the growth rate of the economy of Uzbekistan for the current year has not changed – 4%. According to the State Statistics Committee of Uzbekistan, in the first half of the year, the country’s GDP increased by 5.4%.
Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan this week, Chinese media reported on Monday, citing the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Xi will attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand and will visit Kazakhstan from September 14 to September 16, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.
As previously reported, Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to hold a meeting with Chinese President Xi on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Samarkand.
The SCO summit will be held in Samarkand on September 15-16.
The Uzbek state airline Uzbekistan Airways has resumed flights on the Tashkent-Kyiv-Tashkent route after a six-year break, according to Boryspil International Airport’s Facebook page.
“Yesterday, the Uzbek state airline Uzbekistan Airways returned to Boryspil International Airport on the Tashkent-Kyiv-Tashkent route,” the report says.
Flights will be operated once a week on Sundays.
In addition to Uzbekistan Airways, flights to Tashkent from Kyiv are operated by Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) and SkyUp.
The pharmaceutical company Lekhim plans to launch phase one of its plant in Uzbekistan in 2023 and open ampoule production, Chairman of the supervisory board of the Lekhim Group Valeriy Pechaev has said.
“In 2020, we created the Lekhim enterprise in Tashkent to sell domestic medicines and to organize production in Uzbekistan. The main thing was to find a site for production,” he told Interfax-Ukraine.
According to Pechaev, the company managed to find a plot of 3 hectares on the outskirts of Tashkent for the construction of the plant. The site is located three kilometers from the territory where the Uzbek government plans to organize a pharmaceutical cluster, but does not apply to it.
“We have selected a site, received a permit for perpetual use of land, developed and agreed on a project to master the entire territory and started construction in the spring of this year,” he said.
Pechaev said that since 2020, Lekhim has invested $2.5 million in this project, the total investment until 2023 will be about $10-12 million, and the total cost of the project is about $ 40 million.
“Now, we are financing the project from our own funds, but in 2023 we are planning to attract investments from the EBRD. We have long-standing good relations with them. We think that in 2022, when the buildings and structures are ready, we will attract them to buy equipment,” he said.
Pechaev said that Lekhim plans to attract financing from the EBRD, which will amount to about 30% of the charter capital. In the future, Lekhim plans to use EBRD loans in construction.
The project includes the creation of an ampoule production with an annual capacity of 150 million ampoules, the production of cephalosporin antibiotics with a capacity of about 15-20 million bottles and the production of solid forms of drugs (tablets, capsules) with a capacity of up to 1 billion pieces.
“The first stage, I think, will be launched at the end of 2023. It will be ampoule production. In addition, first of all, we will introduce an administrative building, a central laboratory of the plant, an energy workshop and a production workshop itself with an area of 4,500 square meters for three lines of injectable drugs. Each line produces 50 million ampoules. We will launch one line,” he said.
Pechaev said that in 2024, Lekhim plans to start building a facility to manufacture solid forms and antibiotics.
The company plans to annually produce products worth about $60 million in Uzbekistan. The plant will focus on the regional market, its products will be supplied, in particular, to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and other countries of the region.
Pechaev said that “Uzbekistan today is a country with almost 35 million people, rich in natural resources, cheap gas and oil and, what is important, with a favorable investment climate and the protection of foreign investments declared by the state.”
“Therefore, today in Uzbekistan there is such a boom in investments and a fairly low cost of production,” he said.
Pechaev said that Lekhim also has a trade office in Lithuania, but there is no talk of organizing a production facility there yet.
In addition, the chairman of the supervisory board said that the company is currently also implementing two projects in Ukraine: the construction of a plant for manufacturing cephalosporin antibiotics in injectable and solid forms in Obukhiv (Kyiv region), as well as the launch of vaccine production at the Kharkiv Lekhim plant.
“I think that we will launch the plant in Obukhiv by the end of 2021. We plan to launch vaccine production in Kharkiv in the first quarter of 2022,” he said.
Pechaev said that the capacity of vaccine production will be about 40 million syringes per year.
The facility will produce vaccines against COVID-19 and influenza vaccines using technology transferred to Lekhim by China’s Sinovac Life Sciences.
“China has transferred both technologies to us – for the production of a vaccine against COVID-19 and for the production of a vaccine against influenza. We have already declared this in the Ministry of Health and asked to make a state procurement order with us for 2022 for 17 million doses of vaccines against COVID-19 and 3 million doses flu vaccines,” he said.
Pechaev said that further plans for the development of vaccine production will depend on the epidemiological situation. “I think the coronavirus will never end, and we will just do the annual flu vaccinations,” he said.
At the same time, Pechaev suggested that over time, the technology of inactivated vaccines against COVID-19, which is used to produce the CoronaVac vaccine, will replace the technologies by which other vaccines against COVID-19 are produced.
He said that since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic, Lekhim has delivered 10.2 million doses of CoronaVac vaccine to Ukraine, including 1.9 million vaccines purchased through the state-owned enterprise Medical Procurement of Ukraine and 8.3 million doses purchased through the U.K. procurement agency Crown Agents.
