Category Archives: Uncategorised

Pakistan PM meets Uzbek President

NOV. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif met with Uzbek president Islam Karimov in Tashkent where the leaders signed deals that should deepen bilateral relations .

The trip was significant for Pakistan because it is looking to boost ties with Central Asia and important for Uzbekistan which needs allies to sell cotton to.

Cold-shouldered by the West, which avoids buying Uzbek cotton because of allegations it is picked using child labour, Uzbekistan has boosted relations with Pakistan as it buys Uzbek cotton for its garments industry.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Iran-Armenia sign deal

NOV. 20 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Officials from Iran and Armenia have signed deals which will improve cross-border trade insurance claims and investigations, media reported. The deal underlines the advanced relations between Armenia and Iran. The neighbours need each other to boost trade.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

TeliaSonera’s appoints Tajik Tcell’s head as Eurasia VP

NOV. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Swedish mobile provider TeliaSonera appointed the former head ofTcell, Tajikistan’s biggest mobile network provider, Mansur Khamidov to be a vice-president in charge of the Eurasia region. TeliaSonera is currently restructuring its operations and has said that it wants to sell its Eurasia companies, partly because of corruption allegations alleged against its Uzbek subsidiary. As well as Tajikistan, TeliaSonera owns mobile operations in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Demand for crop monitoring kit rises in Kazakhstan

NOV. 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Cyprus-registered New Science Technologies, which sells satellite crop monitoring equipment, said that demand for its products is growing in Kazakhstan and that it has had to build new capacity. Kazakhstan has increased its grain harvest considerably over the past few years. Kazakhstan’s wheat fields are vast and need satellite technology to monitor.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Kazakhstan’s Halyk Bank files Q3 results

NOV. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Halyk Bank, one of Kazakhstan’s largest retail banks, reported increased net income in the third quarter of 2015 of 36b tenge, roughly a third larger than the third quarter of 2014. In US dollar terms, taking into account the devaluation of the tenge, Q3 2015 and Q3 2014 are roughly the same. Operating expenses grew by 12.7% in the first 9 months of 2015 compared to the same period in 2014 because of wage inflation linked to the devaluation of the tenge.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Turkmenistan Airline boosts routes

NOV. 19 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) — Turkmenistan Airlines is still considering which small aircraft to buy to service domestic routes, the company said when it filed its Q3 results. Earlier this year, Turkmenistan said that it wanted to expand its domestic air service.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Kyrgyz Central Bank buys som

NOV. 13 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Kyrgyzstan’s Central Bank bought another $14m worth of som to steady its value at around 73/$1, highlighting the currency’s fragility. The Kyrgyz som, like other currencies in the region has lost about a third of its value this year.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Azerbaijan’s oil/gas output drops

NOV. 17 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Despite pledging to maintain oil and gas production this year, both have fallen in Azerbaijan. Oil production, vital for the economy, fell 2% to 35m tonnes in the first 10 months of the year, a government source told Reuters, and the national statistics office said gas production dropped 2.7% in same period.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Explosion shuts down Azerbaijan’s internet

NOV. 16 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – A fire at an internet data centre in Azerbaijan knocked nearly the entire country off the World Wide Web for several hours, highlighting the fragility of the country’s infrastructure.

The internet tracking website renesys.com said that the fire at Data Telecom, the near-monopoly internet provider, knocked out 78% of Azerbaijan’s internet system. It also took out Azercell, one of three main mobile providers, as it relies heavily on Data Telecom for transmission.

Acting minister of communications and high technologies ltimas Mammadov – the communications minister was fired last week – told the Azernews website that the fire caused the outage at 4.15pm (1215 GMT).

“Internet outage occurred due to equipment damage at the technical centre of Azerbaijan’s primary service provider,” he said. “However, transmission channels to Georgia, Iran, and the Middle East were working at full capacity.”

Banks said that electronic payments and the SWIFT money transfer system also failed.

The outage will be an embarrassment to Azerbaijan which has tried to project an image of being a thoroughly modern country. Its communications systems now appears over-reliant on one service provider.

In 2011, a 75-year-old woman in Georgia accidentally sliced through a cable, cutting Armenia off from the internet. Georgia had provided 90% of Armenia’s internet access.

The internet black-out in Azerbaijan has shown that the South Caucasus’ internet is still fragile.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)

Uzbek President signs investment programme

NOV. 18 2015 (The Conway Bulletin) – Official media in Uzbekistan reported that President Islam Karimov has signed a resolution to begin a $16.6 investment programme running in 2016 and 2017. The main focus of the programme is to upgrade and modernise the country’s technology and energy sectors. Projects include part of a gas pipeline to China and the construction of both a petro-chemical plant and a thermal power station.

ENDS

(News report from Issue No. 257, published on Nov. 20 2015)