NUR-SULTAN
E-commerce became one of the biggest winners of the pandemic globally and the trend was observed in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan with the number of online shoppers increasing by 20 percent year-on-year in 2020 to 3.8 million.
Kazakhstan has steadily rising incomes, low population density and vast land mass making it an ideal candidate for a robust internet-generated, mail-order business sector. More than 1,700 Internet shops and Business-to-Business (B2B) trade marketplaces exist in Kazakhstan’s domain.
Products sold online include prepaid phone and Internet cards, multi-media, books, computer hardware, computer peripherals and accessories, software, cosmetics, apparel, and more recently, consumer electronics and airline tickets. The most progressive types of e-commerce in Kazakhstan include online airline and railway tickets, and online payments for mobile services and public utilities.
The share of e-commerce in retail trade exceeded 1.1 trillion tenge ($2.5 billion) in the Central Asian country of 19 million people and reached 9.7 percent of the total retail turnover or 11.6 trillion tenge last year, the PrimeMinister.kz reported.
Kazakhstan has also been implementing measures to bring domestic producers to international online shopping platforms including Alibaba.com. As a result, 100 companies have already received a Gold Supplier account on this platform by the end of 2020.
“Based on the positive experience, it is planned to bring 50 companies to the platform this year. This will increase the total volume of export supplies from $50 to $100 million by mid-2022,” Azamat Askaruly, QazTrade Development Center director-general, said.
In May, Kazakhstan received access to one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms – Amazon.
“The main problem was to get access and become one of the allowed countries, to open a legal entity and a bank account in these countries in order to conduct all transactions on the website,” Askaruly said.
“Now Kazakh entrepreneurs can receive payments directly through Kazakh banks. This is a major step for the e-commerce expansion and export of Kazakh goods,” he added.
Kazakh goods are also available on Russia’s Ozon.ru online shopping platform.
The Ministry of Trade and Integration is now working on receiving access to the Mundus Agri platform, which is an information and shopping platform in the global agri-food and agricultural market.
More than 4,600 goods are exported from Kazakhstan to Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Singapore, South Africa and other countries, Bakhyt Sultanov, Trade and Integration Minister, said.
Kazakhstan exports hydraulic truck cranes, pipes used in the oil industry and fish fillets to Canada. The components of helicopters and measuring instruments for the aviation industry are exported to France. Dredgers for offshore use are exported to the Netherlands, pile driving and extraction equipment to Greece, power pumps, bearings and wrench sockets to Algeria and the components for drilling equipment and hydraulic installations to Ireland.
Unalloyed aluminium, rolled metal products, copper, ferrosilicon, lead, ferrochrome, phosphorus, sulfur are also exported.
Liquefied butane and propane are in great demand in dozens of countries. Last year, Kazakhstan exported nearly $600 million worth of liquefied gas.
The list of exported goods includes amino acids, nucleic acids and salts, gluconic acid, cigarettes, cars, household chemicals, food products, and confectionery.