BAKU, Azerbaijan, Nov.24
By Leman Zeynalova – Trend:
Poland’s service sector may be attractive for Azerbaijani capital, Polish Ambassador to Azerbaijan Rafał Poborski told Trend.
“Our mutual investment level is quite low so here there is a lot of work to do and we discussed this issue with Minister Mikayil Jabbarov recently. Poland is always open for foreign investors and we are creating a favourable environment for them. We know that Azerbaijan has a potential to invest in our country. Opening a Trade Office in Warsaw is a clear signal for it. On the other hand, we also opened our Trade Office in Baku, so we expect some synergy effects from these moves in the near future.
Our economy relies mostly on services and there I see potential for Azerbaijani capital. Our Stock Market, the biggest one in the Central Europe could be also an attractive place for investing. Therefore, I am pretty sure that correctly invested assets will bring a good income to our Azerbaijani partners,” said the ambassador.
Poborski noted that according to Polish statistics, in the first half of 2020 the turnover with Azerbaijan has reached the level of $62.33 million.
“Despite the pandemic situation and limited activity, this result is much more better comparing to the same period of 2018 or 2019. Our export to Azerbaijan in 1 and 2Qs of 2020 has increased almost by 60 percent y-o-y. Now Azerbaijani customers can already buy many Polish products in local shops.
Therefore, I think that the most affected dimensions of our cooperation are political and people-to-people. It affects G2G contacts because due to the pandemic it is really difficult not to organise but even to plan some routing meetings like MFA consultations that we tend to hold regularly in previous years. We are forced to limit some other formats, some of them are going into online regime. Nevertheless, it is clear that online meeting cannot replace direct contact in the international relations,” said the envoy.
“Because of the global pandemics we see also lower number of people exchange. It refers to Azerbaijani students going to our country, tourists, some businessmen. We observe drastic fall in number of Poles visiting Azerbaijan this year as well. As you know borders of Azerbaijan has been closed since March so it is a real factor which negatively influence on cooperation between our countries. On the other hand, we understand that Azerbaijani government actively fight against coronavirus and we are glad to see that it has some unique achievements in this field, and that we could help in this endeavours by suppling some medical assistance and organizing on-line exchange of experience between our medical experts,” he added.
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