BAKU, Azerbaijan, March 25. The turnover of wholesale and retail trade in Kazakhstan in 2021 reached $100 billion, General Director of QazTrade JSC Azamat Askaruly said at the panel discussion "Digital Transformation of Retail Trade" as part of the International Investment Forum in Tashkent, Trend reports.
Speakers, among whom were also Deputy Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade of the Republic of Uzbekistan Bakhtiyor Rakhimov, Founder of the Korzinka.uz supermarket chain Zafar Khashimov, Manager of the Makro supermarket chain (Uzbekistan) Roman Sayfulin and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Magnum cash and carry (largest retail chain in Kazakhstan) Azamat Osmanov, discussed the prospects for the development of the Central Asian retail market.
Azamat Askaruly shared his experience in developing retail trade in Kazakhstan.
According to him, the volume of sales in the trade sector of Kazakhstan has a constant upward trend, both in wholesale and retail formats.
The total volume of wholesale and retail trade amounted to 42.2 trillion tenge or $100 billion at the end of 2021. In real terms, the trading industry grew by 7.6 percent per year in the pre-pandemic period. Against the backdrop of strict quarantine, the industry experienced a decline of 7.2 percent in 2020 and real growth was 9.2 percent in 2021.
Growth continued and for the first two months, it amounted to 6.1percent in 2022, while in the retail segment there was a decrease of 7.5 percent.
The COVID-19 pandemic kicke-started the development of e-commerce. The volume of transactions using payment cards exceeded $220 billion in Kazakhstan in 2021. The volume of e-commerce in Kazakhstan has grown 10 times since 2014. Our goal is to bring the share of e-commerce in the country's total retail to 15 percent by 2025. Its share amounted to almost 11 percent for nine months of 2021, Askaruly said.
