Kazakhstan’s banks are actively supporting small and medium-sized businesses, according to the Kazakh National Bank, and as of February 1, 2024, entrepreneurs and small-business owners have been granted loans totaling 7.6 trillion tenge ($16.9 billion). Furthermore, the growth in lending over the last year amounted to 18.75%, or more than 1.2 trillion tenge ($2.2 billion).
The greatest demand for loans is observed among enterprises in the industrial sector, which received loans worth 2.21 trillion tenge ($4.9 billion), an increase of 10.5% annually, as well as in trade, where the volume of lending doubled to 2 trillion tenge ($4.4 billion). At the same time, the smallest loan volume was allocated to representatives of the communications sector – only 52.3 billion tenge ($160 million), which means a 21% decrease over the past year.
When analyzing statistics by region, one can note that the largest amounts of lending is to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from Almaty, which were allocated 3.8 trillion tenge ($8.4 billion), while Astana-based borrowers received 1.25 trillion tenge ($2.8 billion) in loans, an increase of 1%.
Earlier, Elena Bakhmutova, head of the Association of Financial Companies (AFC), noted that over the past eight years, lending to legal entities has increased by only 15%, while lending to individuals registered as sole proprietors increased more than five-fold to 1.6 trillion tenge ($3.6 billion) from 300 billion tenge ($665 million).
