BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 10
Trend:
The work is underway to establish a joint venture through the railway administrations of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, Chief engineer of the Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (Kazakhstan Railways) company, Director of the technical policy department Batyr Kotyrev told Trend.
Kotyrev added that this is necessary to fully reveal the transit potential of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) for cargo flows from China/Central Asian countries to the EU countries and back.
“The joint venture will render the qualitative multimodal, transport and logistics services, help establish a through rate for the transportation of goods across the countries whose railway organizations, ports and sea carriers will be the founders of the joint venture,” the chief engineer said.
Kotyrev said that it will also contribute to the introduction of a single and unique IT platform for the implementation of the activity of the joint venture, which fully automates the services which are rendered for the transportation of goods from China to Turkey and the Black Sea ports.
The chief engineer stressed that "United Transport and Logistics Company - Eurasian Rail Alliance" should be mentioned.
“The transportation volumes increased and logistics was optimized as a result of the establishment of a joint venture,” Kotyrev said. “This helped decrease the rates for customers and keep tariffs stable.”
“Therefore, this issue was discussed at a meeting of the working group on the development of TITR on March 16-17, 2021,” the chief engineer added. “The joint venture which is being created is expected to have the same effect as the joint venture of Kazakhstan Railways, Russian Railways, Belarusian Railway on a parity basis. The container transportation via the China-Europe-China route has been increased from 21,200 TEU to 546,000 TEU, i.e. by 23 times from 2014 through 2020 since the establishment of the United Transport and Logistics Company.”
The chief engineer added that there are clear advantages for creating a joint venture on the TITR route, namely, the introduction of a unified management and sales system, diversification of risks, achievement of parity, the process of rendering the integrated logistics services on the route, etc.
