More than 150 representatives of the French business community participated in the Kazakh-French investment forum to discuss the investment opportunities of Kazakhstan and prospects for implementation of joint projects, the press service of the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan reported on October 9.
Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar said in his speech at the forum that today Kazakh-French relations can be described as a “strategic partnership”. Today an extensive legal framework has been created, including the Strategic Partnership Agreement signed in 2008.
The forum participants stressed that French companies have a high interest to invest in Kazakhstan, which is a strategic corridor linking countries of the Eurasian continent.
During the investment forum, a long-term contract was signed between AirLiquideKarabatanTechGases and Kazakhstan Petrochemical Industries for the supply of technical gases. The contract provides for the construction of a plant for the production of dry compressed air and nitrogen in the territory of the SEZ National Industrial Petrochemical Technopark in Kazakhstan and their delivery to the Integrated Gas Chemical Complex. The signing was a new step in the development of Air Liquide in Kazakhstan as part of a joint venture with Kazakhstan oil company JSC NC KazMunayGas.
Also, within the framework of the forum, about 10 bilateral meetings were held with companies covering projects in the field of energy, livestock, mining, oil and gas industry, including IDEMIA, AIRBUS GROUP, CNCR Group, ORANO MINING, BureauVeritas, IFP Energies Nouvelles and others.
Today, France is among the five key trade and investment partners of Kazakhstan. Over the past years, mutual trade turnover has reached $50 billion. Along with this, a number of large joint investment projects have been implemented in the uranium, oil and gas, titanium industries, in the field of transport engineering, the production of building materials, food products, etc., which made it possible to attract over the past 14 years more than $15.6 billion of French investments.
Despite these solid results, there is considerable potential for expanding and deepening bilateral partnerships in the economic sphere, especially in the three priority sectors identified by the presidents of Kazakhstan and France: alternative energy, agriculture and digitalization.
