Azerbaijan intends to increase exports to Central Europe
By Rashid Shirinov
Azerbaijan plans to increase its exports to the countries of Central Europe, namely Poland, by the end of this year, trade representative of Azerbaijan in Poland Nemat Nagdaliyev told Trend on August 21.
He noted that the trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Poland amounted to $50,137 million in January-July this year. Of this amount, $4,435 million accounted for exports from Azerbaijan to Poland, and $45,702 million fell on imports.
Given that the trade turnover between the two countries was $37.06 million in the first seven months of 2017, the growth of trade turnover amounted to 35.3 percent this year.
“The dynamics of growth of trade turnover in the last five years is at roughly the same level, so a serious growth in trade is not yet expected. Nevertheless, we are working in this direction,” Nagdaliyev said.
He further noted that today the main share in the export of Azerbaijani products to China and Central Europe falls on alcoholic beverages, juices and compotes.
“In the future, Azerbaijan intends to focus on developing cooperation with Poland in such areas as agriculture, transport, chemical industry, information technology, tourism and small electronics. Today there are all the prerequisites for this,” the trade representative said.
He also mentioned that last year Polish Economic Development Ministry defined Azerbaijan as one of the 22 most promising markets around the world for Polish companies. Nagdaliyev added that Poland became the 4th largest trade partner of Azerbaijan in 2017.
It is noteworthy that Poland is the 6th largest market in the European Union, and its economy is fast-growing. Last year, the country’s GDP growth was 4.6 percent, and the forecast for 2018 is 3.8 percent.
As for Azerbaijan, the country’s trade turnover amounted to $22.59 billion last year: the exports made up $13.81 billion and the imports – $8.78 billion. Thus, the foreign trade turnover of Azerbaijan grew by 27.8 percent last year, with exports growing by 51.1 percent.
The main export operations were carried out to Italy (31.9 percent of total exports), Turkey (9.89 percent), Israel (4.63 percent), Russia (4.25 percent), Czech Republic (4.03 percent), Canada (3.87 percent) and Georgia (3.41 percent). To date, the largest trading partners of Azerbaijan are Russia, Italy, Turkey, Israel, Germany and China.
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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov
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