By Azernews

By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade

Azerbaijan takes important steps to improve its status of the regional transit center. Favorable geographical position of Azerbaijan has created new opportunities for the country in terms of turning Baku into a major transport and logistics center for the postal delivery of goods from international electronic trading platforms.

The National Strategy for the Development of the Information Society for 2014-2020, strategic roadmaps for the main sectors of the economy and the initiative to form a digital trade hub in the country also play an important role for implementation of the goals in this area.

For about three years, an international project has been carried out on the operation of the postal operator of Azerbaijan, Azerpost, as a regional transit postal center (hub) providing interstate e-commerce services. For this, Azerpost and Silk Way airline signed agreement on cooperation, which entered into force from July 2016.

Project envisages the delivery of e-commerce goods to Azerbaijan, which are ordered in China and transported by Silk Way, as well as their subsequent processing by Azerpost and further shipment to CIS countries or customers in other countries of the world.

Based on the contract concluded with the Hong Kong company, within the first quarter of 2019, the transit center in Baku handled 18.89 million postal items and sent it to 17 countries.

In addition, based on the contract signed between the EMS service, Azerpost and the Estonian Post, fast postal items coming from the U.S. and Germany are sent via Azerpost to Russia.

Currently, in order to expand the project activities, negotiations are underway with other companies in China, South Korea and Singapore, which operate as express carriers.

As for statistics, in 2018, over 4.25 million postal items with a total weight of about 365.4 tons were delivered from China to the Azerpost transit center. The items were processed and sent to the U.S., the UAE, Germany, Austria, Belarus, the UK, the Czech Republic, France, Iran, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, etc.

In addition, in 2018, the postal operator received over 9.96 million internal postal items, which is 1.6 percent more than in 2017. Over 99,700 letters and parcels were sent, which is 6 percent more than in 2017. Besides, the number of registered letters and parcels increased by 4.2 percent and reached almost 50,000 in 2018 compared with 2017.

Meanwhile, the number of international small postal items received exceeded 1.26 million, which is 44.5 percent more than in 2017.

In 2018, more than 15,700 international parcels were sent, which is almost 27 percent more than in 2017. The postal operator received almost 35,400 international parcels in 2018, which is a 7.4 percent growth.