The Rhenus Group is planning to expand its activities in Kazakhstan and is intending to establish a business site and container depot in the industrial city of Karaganda. The Member of the Rhenus Group Management Board, Michael Viefers, told the Kazakh President, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, about this at a meeting on the fringes of the Munich Security Conference on 14 February.
The transport infrastructure in Kazakhstan has been extensively modernised to enable the country to act as a hub along the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The connections between the Chinese province of Jiangsu and Rotterdam in the Netherlands as well as along the Xinjiang, Iran and Turkey corridor are particularly important here. More than half of all the goods trains operating between China and Europe pass through the world’s largest land-locked country.
“Kazakhstan is the second-most important country in terms of imports and exports for China. It has a favourable geographical location as a transit country located between East and West. German companies like the Rhenus Group can particularly play a part in the growing cargo handling operations by having their own business sites in the country,”
said Michael Viefers, member of the Rhenus Group Management Board.
The logistics services provider, Rhenus, has so far had business operations in the capital, Nur-Sultan, and in Almaty, the country’s largest city, through its subsidiary, Rhenus Intermodal Systems, which specialises in global container logistics. Karaganda has about 500,000 residents and is Kazakhstan’s fourth-largest city; it is particularly important for the coal, iron and steel and cement industries.
