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By Trend

In the first half of 2018, Chinese investments in Kazakhstan amounted to $15.6 billion, compared to $14.8 billion a year earlier, Finprom.kz reported.

In the last three years, there has been a 6.6 percent increase in investment flows from China.

The 5 most attractive Kazakh sectors for Chinese investors are transportation and warehousing ($4.9 billion), mining ($2.6 billion), financial and insurance activities ($2.2 billion), construction ($2.1 billion) and manufacturing ($2.1 billion). These industries accounted for 88.9 percent ($14 billion) of the total Chinese investments in January-June 2018.

The total number of Kazakh-Chinese investment projects is 51, and the total investment is estimated at more than $27 billion. In 2018-2019, eleven more projects with more than $4.4 billion investments will be launched.

The main project is One Belt One Road, within which a number of major infrastructure projects have already been put into operation in 5 years: the port of Lianyungang; the dry port Khorgos-Eastern Gate on the Kazakh-Chinese state border; the port of Aktau on the Caspian Sea; the new Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran railway corridor; and the international transit corridor Western Europe-Western China passing through Kazakhstan. More than 80 trade and economic cooperation zones have been established with the participation of Chinese companies along the One Belt One Road route.

It is worth noting that the foreign trade turnover of Kazakhstan and China in the first 9 months of 2018 amounted to $8.2 billion. The countries' mutual exports and imports were almost the same: exports to China made up $4.2 billion (a 6.6 percent increase year-on-year), while imports from China were $4 billion (a 17.2 percent growth year-on-year).

Last year, China ranked second in terms of trade with Kazakhstan — the total trade turnover was $10.5 billion.

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