Negative trends in the economy put pressure on small business activity – for the annual period (January 2015-2016), the total number of small and medium business entities decreased by 2%, while in the previous year there was a growth of even 53% Zakon.kz informs. 

The number of individual entrepreneurs has dropped by 5% (up to 945.6 thousand entities) which is the fastest reduction in January 2015-2016 while the number of peasant farms has reduced less significantly – by 3%, up to 181.0 thousand entities.

The bigger participants of small and medium business market have survived: legal entities engaged in small and medium scale business whose number has increased for the annual period by 19% and 11%, respectively.

We would like to note that in January 2015 there was a change in the method of determining the size of small and medium enterprises, and therefore the number of small ones has increased dramatically (by more than 2 times), and the number of medium ones was reduced. The statistics for January 2016 for the first time in the year shows a real picture of the annual growth, excluding the methodological changes.

* The sharp rise in the number of small companies in 2015 is largely due to changes in the methods used for counting them.

Almaty accounts for about 40% of the annual growth in number of existing small business legal entities – 11.2 thousand units, up to 55.6 thousand. Thus, now 31% of all small legal entities of Kazakhstan are operating in Almaty.

The second place in terms of growth rate belongs to Astana where the number of such entities for the year has increased by 5.3 thousand, up to 27.3 thousand (15% of all small entities). Karaganda closes the top three with the growth by 1.7 thousand, up to 13.9 thousand entities.