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Azerbaijan, Russia to apply unified tariffs for railway transportation

14 October 2015 12:22 (UTC+04:00)
Azerbaijan, Russia to apply unified tariffs for railway transportation

By Nigar Orujova

Azerbaijan and Russia are negotiating on the introduction of unified tariffs for railway transportation, said Salman Babayev, the vice-president of the Russian Railways.

Babayev made the remarks at the international conference “Prospects of Transit Potential Development of Azerbaijan” on October 13.

Russia has already signed similar agreements with Kazakhstan and Belarus, he added.

“We really want Azerbaijan to be the next country joining this agreement,” Babayev said. “Also, we hope to sign a similar agreement with Georgia.”

The vice president said that the agreement involves the introduction of a single rate of transportation of one ton of cargo or cargo container per kilometer.

By 2020, the transit potential of Azerbaijan will reach $600-700 million or 300,000 containers, said president of Kazakhstan Railways Askar Mamin.

“We highly appreciate the potential of the Trans-Caspian route, in particular the international transport corridor Baku-Tbilisi-Kars,” said Mamin.

The expansion of the volume of transit cargo will contribute to the development of China’s trade relations with the Caucasus and Turkey and increase the value of the Trans-Caspian transport route, he believes.

The president of Kazakhstan Railways said the transit cargo may bring big profits to Azerbaijan, as it happened in Kazakhstan, reaching about $1 billion a year.

At present, Azerbaijan plays a leading role not only in large-scale projects focused on the transportation of oil and gas, but transport as well, which are designed to create a global transport corridor from China to Europe.

Azerbaijan is the initiator and participant in the creation of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway. In addition, the country is finalizing construction on a new international sea trade port in Alat settlement, and has already received the first container train from China along the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route.

The capitalization of the transport sector exceeded $20 billion in the last decade in Azerbaijan.

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Nigar Orujova is AzerNews’s staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @o_nigar

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz

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