Processing industry growing in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is demonstrating sustainable growth of its processing industry, Tengrinews.kz reports citing Kazakhstan Prime-Minister's website. "A tendency of sustainable growth of the processing industry in Kazakhstan continued in 2012. The highest growth is registered in engineering (16.2 percent), production of other non-metal mineral goods (10.6 percent), light industry (8.3 percent), chemical industry (5.9 percent), pharmaceutical industry (5.6 percent)," the website writes. Besides, last year's performance in processing industry increased 1.4-fold. The performance grew almost 2-fold in engineering, 1.9-fold in production of other non-metal mineral goods, 1.9-fold in metallurgy, 1.8-fold in chemical industry, 1.3-fold in light and pharmaceutical industries, correspondingly. According to the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies, 162 projects worth 313 billion tenge ($2.09 billion) were implemented as part of the Industrialization Map in 2012. The total worth of the produced goods made 913 billion tenge ($6.07 billion) or 5.5 percent of the total volume of the industrial production. In general, the share of processing industry made 8 percent or 421.5 billion tenge ($2.8 billion) of the total of 5.2 trillion tenge ($34.7 billion). As for innovative development, 20 projects were selected, 15 commercialization offices and 2 regional centers for technologies commercialization were opened last year as part of the technology-intensive business incubation program. "148 applications for commercialization were submitted. 38 of them were selected for concept justification and 20 were chosen for further commercialization," the authority writes. The volume of energy generation from renewable energy sources increased from 0.42 billion kWh in 2011 to 0.45 billion kWh in 2012. By Gulnara Zhandagulova