Baku, Azerbaijan, January 30
Trend:
Uzbekistan has increased import of cane and beet sugar in natural terms by 13 times to 7,147,600 tons in 2018, Trend reports via Dividends financial news agency.
Uzbekistan imported sugar from 17 countries last year. The largest volumes of purchases fell to Ukraine - 223.800 tons, Russia - 193.200 tons, Pakistan - 147.800 tons, Kazakhstan - 57.700 tons, Iran - 40.400 tons and Belarus - 23.600 tons.
Nowadays, there are two enterprises in Uzbekistan that specialize in sugar production - Khorezm Shakar JSC with a capacity of 1,000 tons of sugar per day and with value of $ 83.25 million and Angren Shakar JSC with a similar capacity and the value of $108.5 million.
Both enterprises began to significantly reduce the production from the second half of 2017 till its full stop in 2018 because of the devaluation of national currency in September 2017 (almost 2 times) which sharply increased the cost of imported raw sugar.
Khorezm Shakar JSC received from Uzpromstroybank a loan in the amount of $20 million for the replenishment of working capital and the purchase of raw sugar at the beginning of 2018.
Previously, the main shareholders of both companies were Singaporean Welton and Trent International Enterprises, KITO Investments and the Austrian SEID Handelsgesellschaft.
However, the capital entrepreneur purchased 1.42 million common shares of Khorezm Shakar JSC at the exchange trading for 7.1 billion soums or more than $900,000 at the Central Bank rate on the day of the transaction on September 13, 2018.
The number of his shares, afterwards, reached 2.82 million which and accounted for 99.43 percent of the authorized capital of the Khorezm sugar factory whose construction took $83.25 million worth of investments.