Minister of Investment Laziz Qudratov and the visiting Kazakh Minister of Trade and Integration Arman Shakkaliev held talks and agreed to set up a joint working group to lift trade barriers on Friday.
The ministers discussed the road map for the implementation of investment agreements and trade contracts signed during the visit of the Kazakh president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to Uzbekistan, the progress of projects and the ways to further advance trade and economic ties and industrial cooperation between the two countries.
Over the past seven years, the two-way trade grew by almost 2.5 times, from US$ 1.9 billion in 2016 to 4.6 billion in 2023 (although there has been a slight decline in recent years).
The parties also agreed on a number of steps to increase the trade to $10 billion in the coming years.
They vowed to set up an online trading platform as part of the joint foreign trade company UzKazTrade for selling a wide range of goods in the markets of both countries.
While, the ministers agreed to take measures to expedite the creation of the Central Asia international center for industrial cooperation. Steps are currently being taken to create and connect infrastructure to it.
As previously reported, the facility will be located near the Atameken and Gulistan checkpoints and will include production sites, warehouses for storing goods and equipment, as well as transport infrastructure. This will speed up the delivery of goods and reduce logistics costs.
The center will stimulate the creation of new industries, jobs, processing of agricultural and industrial products, as well as provide logistics services for the further transportation of goods.
In March 2023, a joint company UzKazTrade was created between Uztrade and QazTrade to supply fruits and vegetables from Uzbekistan and flour from Kazakhstan. A little later it became known that UzKazTrade plans to wholesale fruits and vegetables from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan without a commercial markup.
