At a meeting of the Kazakh-Chinese commission on road transportation on 24 May in Aktau, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Transport reported on a test run of the transit of goods along the China-Kazakhstan-Azerbaijan-Georgia route through the seaports of Kuryk and Baku across the Caspian Sea.
On 23 May, the first three Chinese trucks, weighing 80 tons, travelled from Urumqi through Kazakhstan to the city of Aktau’s Kuryk port and after being loaded onto a ferry, continued their journey to Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Europe.
Praising the agreement with China on enhancing road transportation signed last year, Ali Altai, Chairman of the Committee for Road Transport and Transport Control at the Ministry of Transport of Kazakhstan, commented: “For the first time in history, vehicles from both countries can travel directly to all our major trading cities and transit through their territories. It currently takes up to 52 days for hundreds of millions of tons of cargo to be shipped by sea from China to Western countries, and up to 22 days to transport smaller volumes by rail. Road transport can reduce the delivery time to 12 days, on a ‘door to door’ basis without intermediate loading/unloading.”
