A Year on, Kazakh Devaluation Brings Ostriches to the Steppe
- From farming to fashion, tenge’s slump gives companies an edge
- ING: Kazakh currency’s real effective rate is near record low
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Aliya Akhmetova has no complaints about the 40 percent collapse in the Kazakh tenge. One year after the government took the decision to stop supporting the currency, sales at her online fashion start-up have tripled.
“Customers were saying they’d looked round the malls or made shopping trips to Dubai and come to the conclusion that foreign clothes were just too expensive,” Akhmetova, the founder of Heybaby.kz, said by phone from Astana. “Look at Russia. Their designers are booming, their plants are loaded with orders after the ruble fell” in recent years, she said. “This will come to Kazakhstan too.”