Baku, Azerbaijan, March 30
By Fikret Dolukhanov – Trend:
Kazakh Prime Minister Bakytzhan Sagintayev visited the fish processing plant in the city of Aralsk and Araltuz salt plant in the Aral Sea region on March 29, observing the the development of local fish and food industry, the official website of the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan said in a statement.
According to the statement, the fishing industry in the Aral Sea region is growing rapidly. There are currently 22 fish processing enterprises in the Kyzylorda province, including four of them oriented on exporting the goods to the countries of the European Union, three – to China, nine – to the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union.
According to official statistics, the volume of fish export amounted to $56.5 million in 2017, which makes two-thirds of Kazakhstan’s total fish production. Kyzylorda province's contribution to these exports exceeded $12 million (3,500 tons).
Sagintayev familiarized himself with the production process of the Aral Fish Processing Plant, with a capacity of 6,000 tons per year. Finished production is exported to the markets of Russia, China, Poland, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan.
The Prime Minister also visited the Araltuz plant, the only iodized salt plant and the largest salt extraction and processing enterprise in the country.
As part of the State Program on Industrial and Innovative Development, Araltuz company commissioned two factories with Spanish equipment for the production of food and technical salt. The first factory operates using the European technology and produces nine types of table salt with iodine supplements.
In order to expand production of technical salt, the second Spanish line, the polymer production plant, was acquired in 2016. Reconstruction of the plant allowed doubling the labor productivity and providing more than 1200 people with jobs, and increasing the wages of workers by 60 percent. The volume of production and sales increased more than threefold, and the share of export products reached 65 percent.