The Path of Least Resistance
Kazakhstan sells to 85 countries and could sell far more. Its trade policy settles for what sells itself.
A lost decade
Goods exports were $84.7bn in 2013 and $81.6bn in 2024. Eleven years and several industrialisation programmes later, the total is where it started. Mineral fuels still make up 57%.
Five countries, one product
Five countries take 64% of exports. The largest buyer, Italy, spends $18.7bn a year on Kazakh goods, and 99% of it is oil. Pipelines and tankers do the selling; no trade policy is required.
Most of the rest sells next door
Beyond oil and metals, Kazakhstan has 26 competitive products, goods it can export more cheaply or better than most countries: sunflower oil, fertilizers, polypropylene, beef, nuclear fuel and more. China, Russia and four Central Asian neighbours buy 70% of them. Further away, sales narrow to one bulk good per market: sulphur to Morocco, pulses to Türkiye, fertilizer to Brazil.
Big markets, almost no sales
Each of these products has a deep import market abroad that Kazakhstan barely serves; the chart shows a few examples. India imports $3.8bn of NPK fertilizer and $3.6bn of sunflower oil a year, none of it from Kazakhstan. Germany, China and the US import $10.6bn of ball and roller bearings, less than $0.1m of it from Kazakhstan. The US imports $5.9bn of beef and $8.1bn of fish fillets, again with nothing from Kazakhstan.
The buyers are elsewhere
World imports of these products total $453bn a year. The US alone buys $47.1bn; Kazakhstan sold it just $1.4m of these goods. Germany, India, Brazil and France import another $77bn, of which Kazakhstan supplies 0.2%.
Leaders next door, absent beyond
Kazakhstan's competitive products lead in neighbouring markets: they make up 40% of Uzbekistan's imports of these goods and 82% of Kyrgyzstan's. Elsewhere they barely register: of the 62 countries that import more than $1bn of these goods a year, 43 buy less than 0.1% of it from Kazakhstan. The competitiveness is there; the sales beyond the region are not.
The $6.6bn question
Kazakhstan already holds 2.5% of China's imports of these products. Matching that share in the next 20 largest markets, with everything else held steady, would add $6.6bn a year. That is nearly twice the $3.6bn the products earn today. Simple arithmetic, not a forecast.
The export nobody counts
Britain and Switzerland recorded $8.1bn of gold from Kazakhstan in 2024. Kazakhstan's own statistics show $0.42bn. The gold leaves through the National Bank, so the country's second-largest export is missing from its trade data.
Transit dressed as industry
One example tells the story. Kazakhstan's plywood exports went from $0.5m in 2021 to $83m in 2023, 97% of it to the EU. Over the same two years plywood imports rose by $81m, mostly from China and Russia, and both fell back together in 2024. Exports that rise and fall with imports point to goods passing through, not a new industry. Our screen finds 13 more products with similar import-heavy patterns.
Raw materials, relabelled
The government's headline trade target is 'non-resource' exports. The label suggests manufacturing, yet it also counts copper cathodes, silver, uranium and ferroalloys: raw materials after first processing. In 2024 these earned $11.7bn, while the 26 competitive products earned just $3.6bn, about a tenth of goods exports outside oil, gas and coal.