President Aliyev: Azerbaijan ready to receive more cargoes

President Ilham Aliyev has said that all necessary infrastructure facilities in Azerbaijan are ready to receive more cargoes.

“Azerbaijan has excellent relations with its neighbors to the West - Georgia and Türkiye and to the East - Central Asia,” said President Ilham Aliyev at a plenary meeting on “Eurasia’s Middle Corridor: From Pathway to Highway” held as part of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Azertag reports.

“And being a kind of a natural geographical bridge between the East and West, we invested largely into transportation infrastructure in the previous years. Actually, all the necessary infrastructure facilities in Azerbaijan are ready to receive more cargoes,” the president noted.

“Our seaport, which has a capacity of 15 million tonnes, will be expanded up to 25 million tonnes, with the budget already allocated for that,” he underlined.

“We expect a growing number of cargoes for particular reasons,” the head of state added.

“Starting from this year, we started to transit oil from Kazakhstan. Not only from Turkmenistan, which already takes place for many years, with the potential to use this corridor also for hydrocarbons,”  Aliyev said.

“I think that we now need to have more closer cooperation between all the countries involved - Central Asia, Caucasus and Europe. In order to work actively on customs administration, to have more or less a single window approach and on tariffs policy. Because, we need to make this route not only attractive from point of view of absence of other routes, but attractive from a commercial point of view,” the president noted.

“Becoming a transit country, in the sense of today's reality is important. But for us, the most important thing is jobs and local production,”  Aliyev said at the meeting.

“For that purpose, we are working very hard on diversification of our economy. We think that the transportation not only will be helping us to diversify our exports, so, we will export the services. But at the same time being on route on the Middle Corridor, at the same time being on route of the North-South Corridor, creates additional opportunities for business in Azerbaijan,” the president noted.

“Soon there will be the inauguration of the free zone in Baku, which is just next door to the seaport. We hope that these free zone will be a place of manufacturing and the place where companies will find itself appropriate to invest,”  Aliyev emphasised.

“Improvement of business climate, of course, is one of the main factors of success. Because all the countries in the world, even the most developed, they need additional investments,” he added.

“We have several formats of trilateral cooperation - ministers of foreign affairs, defense and economy. There also was the summit of leaders, and we started sharing the profit,” Aliyev said.

“We started clearly understanding that should be a balance - we started with energy project definitely - between producers, transitors and consumers. We managed to create this win-win situation and how to say balance of interests was preserved,” the president noted.