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Dollar Stores, Pound Shops…and Tenge Markets
Posted on April 15th, 2009 Comments welcome Share/Save PrintIn past years, Kazakh consumers have flocked to the sleek, modern format retailers opening across the country. With the onset of the financial crisis, however, the growth rate of country’s retail sector has started decreasing, and traditional open-air markets have gotten busier once again. There is, however, a growing middle ground emerging, competing with the markets for penny-pinching consumers: the discount retailers. Read more »
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Confidence in Kazakhstan Dented…But Only Cosmetically
Posted on March 30th, 2009 Comments welcome Share/Save PrintBy Yekaterina Syrtsova, Associate Account Manager, The PBN Company
People in Kazakhstan feel surprisingly optimistic about the country’s economic situation, according to a recent poll by the Post-Crisis World Institute and the Public Opinion Foundation. Interfax reports that only 16.6% of people believe that life will get harder before the summer, while 35.4% expect that the situation will improve. The latter figure stands in contrast to Russia and Ukraine, where far fewer people (12.6% in Russia and 6.5% in Ukraine) expect the situation to get better before the summer.
Kazakhs also look favorably on their government’s anti-crisis measures - BusinessNewEurope reports that “66.3% [gave] their government a thumbs up, against 40.7% in Russia and just 13.5% in Ukraine. Of those that criticized the government for its action (or lack of it) the numbers were 9.2% in Kazakhstan, 21.5% in Russia and a whopping 74.3% in Ukraine.”
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Kazakhstan to Shut Private Exchange Bureaus
Posted on March 11th, 2009 Comments welcome Share/Save PrintThe National Bank of Kazakhstan is planning to amend existing legislation in order to cancel the licenses of private, non-bank currency exchange bureaus trading in foreign currencies. National Bank head Grigoriy Marchenko believes that the bureaus have been exploiting the February tenge devaluation in order to extract excess profits, and that the changes are necessary in order to stabilize the retail currency markets. Read more »
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Tenge Devaluation: One Month On
Posted on March 5th, 2009 Comments welcome Share/Save PrintOn February 4, Kazakhstan’s National Bank dramatically devalued the tenge from a corridor of 117-123 tenge/US dollar to 145-155 tenge/US dollar, citing the decline in oil price (oil comprises 60% of Kazakh exports); currency devaluations in Kazakhstan’s neighbors, particularly Russia; and the fledgling state of the domestic banking sector. The sudden devaluation was unexpected - the general sense in the financial community was that it wouldn’t happen until March or April, and even then it would be an incremental devaluation throughout 2009. Read more »
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