As part of the implementation of the Address of the Head of State to the people of Kazakhstan “Economic Course of a Fair Kazakhstan”, the Government of Kazakhstan is actively working on a roadmap to eliminate bottlenecks and develop the Middle Corridor until 2027, covering Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia. The goal is to increase the capacity of the corridor to 10 million tons per year.
To ensure sufficient volumes of transit cargo from East to West, Kazakhstan and China signed a number of agreements in November 2023 on the development of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, including container trains from China to Europe. These agreements were ratified by the law of the Republic of Kazakhstan on July 1, 2024.
To increase the competitiveness of the route, a single multimodal service was created along its entire length. An important step was the establishment of a joint venture Middle Corridor Multimodal Ltd. on the basis of the Astana International Financial Center, which united the railway administrations of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia to jointly manage the route.
In addition, to improve logistics services, the KTZ IT system was integrated with the customs module of the DTC platform – Tez Customs, developed by Global DTC Kazakhstan Ltd. As a result of such efforts, the volume of transportation on the route has grown significantly: in 2023, it increased by 65% compared to 2022, reaching 2.76 million tons.