Hans-Paul Buerkner: “It is important that people see their future in Kazakhstan”
“Kazakhstan has made an enormous progress thanks to a lot of pushing fr om the government, the private sector and the whole society in Kazakhstan,” – believes Hans-Paul Buerkner, the Chairman of Boston Consulting Group. However, in his opinion, “one of the key elements is to make sure people, whether young or old, see the future in this country or in Central Asia and do not have the thinking that they need to go to London or to Singapore to realize their ideas”.
“It is important to really open up and make sure that people can try out their ideas. They should see the opportunities in existing companies or new startups and try them out. Maybe fail sometimes. But it is important to give them an opportunity to make their ideas become reality,” - said Hans-Paul Buerkner during the plenary session at KGIR-2019.
According to the Chairman of BCG, it is erroneously to separate economy to the old economy and the new economy. “First of all, I would like to encourage you to go away fr om the talks about new economy and old economy. We need to talk about the whole economy and technology. Not just digitalization, but how technologies in the past affected every industry, every sector, every company and actually all our lives. This artificial separation of old and new economy is really wrong,” – noted Hans-Paul Buerkner.
Speaking at the plenary session, he recommended thinking of how to use the opening opportunities for application in all sectors of the economy. “We need to think about how to make use of digitalisation, data analytics, and technology in all its different forms. We need to see how we can really do a better job not just in terms of e-commerce, uber, e-payments, FinTech, and dating platforms, but also to think about the key activities that we have in Kazakhstan and also in Central Asia, Eurasian economic zone. We need to think more broadly, because it is not efficient to think only about Kazakhstan. So, we have resources here – oil and gas, mining, petrochemical industry, agriculture, cement, steel, and service industries, such as logistics, retailing, financial services. All of these industries will have to change fundamentally,” – said Hans-Paul Buerkner.
“And I think it is very important to see this in a very holistic way. The companies need to think about the whole value chain fr om R&D, engineering, production, logistics, administration, financing, marketing, sales and so forth. What are the key pain points? What are the obstacles? What are the problems? What are the customer complaints about? Where do we have leakage, waste? Wh ere can we save resources, energy? How can we optimise the processes? We need to look at all the elements of a value chain and see how technology can really make a difference,” – continued the speaker.
Talking about investment perspective and opportunities of Kazakhstan in a digital space, Hans-Paul Buerkner opined that there is no necessity of “creating something that no one else in the world has”. Investing opportunities exist in the key areas, wh ere Kazakhstan is strong (oil and gas, agriculture, financial services, tourism, logistics, transportation) and wh ere technologies can be applied for improving existing processes.
