ASTANA (TCA) — The head of Kazakhstan’s national railways company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ) Kanat Alpysbaev during the 14th China International Logistics week held a series of meetings on pairing Kazakhstan’s program Nurly Zhol and China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, to boost cargo transportation between Asia and Europe through Kazakhstan, the KTZ press service said on July 1.
At the meeting with the Deputy Mayor of Chengdu, Xie Zhu Yu, the parties noted the success of cooperation in organization of container transportation along the China-Europe route through Kazakhstan.
In 2016, about 160 container trains were sent from Chengdu to Poland (Lodz), which is 2.6 times more than in 2015. In the opposite direction, 85 trains passed. For 5 months of this year 110 container trains have already passed along this direction.
Currently, transportation is carried out from Chengdu through Kazakhstan to Germany, the Netherlands, and Belarus and in the opposite direction.
The sides exchanged views on the issues of increasing the volume of cargo transportation to Europe, CIS, Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, as well as reorientation of cargo flows to the Khorgos-Altynkol border crossing.
During the trip to China the head of KTZ also met with the first deputy governor of Gansu province Huang Qian.
The parties discussed joint development of international logistics and container transportations using the infrastructure potential of the SEZ Khorgos-Eastern Gates on the Kazakh-Chinese border.
SEZ Khorgos-Eastern Gates with a Dry Port is a key project for the development of the transit potential of Eurasian region and as a logistics hub opens the market of the Eurasian Economic Union with a population of more than 180 million.
“We can do transshipment, processing and handling of cargoes in the Dry Port of the SEZ, which significantly reduces the time of border operations and increases the speed of container trains up to 1200 km/day in Kazakhstan alone,” Alpysbayev said.
As a result of the trip to China, an agreement was signed between KTZ and Sinotrans & CSC Holdings on strategic cooperation in launching container trains.
