Kazakhstan: the wide door into Central Asia, with a queue already at it

The Bureau of National Statistics puts 2025 imports at $64,847 million and exports at $79,041 million. Exports fell 3.2% while imports grew 7.4%, so the country is buying more abroad on a smaller export income than a year earlier. Russia supplied 29.7% of imports and China 29.2%. Germany came third with 4.8%, then South Korea at 3.5%, the United States at 3.3% and France at 2.4%.

Read those shares as a buyer would. German goods alone are worth around three billion dollars a year here, so a European manufacturer isn't exotic. It is one more option next to a German or Korean line the distributor already carries. Price pressure comes from Chinese and Russian suppliers who ship overland and quote in yuan or roubles. What a European or Gulf brand sells against that is service, spare parts on the shelf, certificates in order and a name the buyer can check.

The top import lines by value are consumer goods: passenger cars 4.4%, medicines 2.8%, phones 2.4%. For equipment and materials the buyer is rarely the end user. It is a distributor, an engineering contractor or a procurement department running a tender, and each of them checks a supplier online before answering an email.

Kazakhstan is a founding member of the Eurasian Economic Union; the treaty came into force on 1 January 2015. Products covered by the union's technical regulations carry the EAC mark, which the Eurasian Economic Commission describes as proof of conformity with those regulations. Certification firms working with the union, Schmidt & Schmidt among them, point to two consequences for a foreign supplier: an EAC certificate or declaration is valid in all five member states, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Belarus and Armenia, and only a company registered inside the union can apply for one.

That second point decides how you enter. A manufacturer in Milan or Dubai cannot hold the certificate itself. Either the distributor becomes the applicant, which ties the document to that distributor, or an authorised representative inside the union holds it on the manufacturer's behalf. Settling this before the first shipment rather than after it is what keeps the manufacturer in control of its own market access.

Certify once for Kazakhstan and the same paper opens Kyrgyzstan and the rest of the union; Uzbekistan, outside the union, needs a certificate of its own. That is the practical reason regional distribution gets planned from Almaty.

DataReportal's Digital 2026 report counts 20.9 million people in Kazakhstan and 19.5 million internet users, 93.4% of the population. Instagram's advertising tools reach 13.1 million of them, 62.7% of the country, and TikTok reports 16.9 million adult users. Facebook reaches 2.5 million. Telegram publishes no audience figures, so nobody can quote a number for it honestly. In our experience it is where a distributor's working day happens: price lists, order confirmations, the group chat with the supplier.

The people who own distribution companies and run procurement at plants sit in the same feeds as everyone else. A brand with no Russian-language footprint on Instagram, TikTok and Telegram is absent from the place where the buyer forms a first impression. An English-language LinkedIn page does not stand in for it here.

In our work, negotiations, specifications and contracts with distributors are written and argued in Russian. Kazakh matters for consumer-facing content and carries more weight in the south and west of the country, but a supplier who arrives with Russian-language materials can work with every distributor we have met. Materials in English only tend to sit unread.

The exhibition calendar runs through the Atakent complex in Almaty. KazBuild, the construction and interiors show, sits in early September, and the organiser has already fixed the next edition for 7-9 September 2027. KIOGE, the oil and gas exhibition, is in its 30th year at the same venue, and FoodExpo Qazaqstan in its 28th. Mining moves to Karaganda for Mining Week Kazakhstan.

A stand at any of them buys three days in a hall. Used differently, the same shows are worth more: the exhibitor lists are a public map of who supplies what, and a brand that has been visible to those companies for the months before the show meets them as an acquaintance rather than a stranger. We worked through the arithmetic of that in the Journal, and through what a single Almaty trip buys against three months of presence in a second piece.

Artifact works from Almaty. The Pilot month is a demand check on the ground: which distributors carry competing lines, what they ask for, whether the tender rules fit, a local landing page and channel in Russian, the first outreach, and a written go or no-go. If the answer is go, the same team runs the distributor pipeline from month two.