Almaty Building & Co owns and manages industrial and warehouse premises in Almaty, leased to commercial tenants. The company holds and operates the property it owns rather than developing it for sale.
Central Asia is short of about 2 million m² of modern warehouse space
Central Asia needs close to two million square metres of additional modern warehouse space, requiring investment of up to US$1.5 billion, according to analysis published by the Eurasian Development Bank in October 2025. Announced projects across the region come to about 1.6 million square metres, which leaves a gap even if every one is delivered.
Three things are driving it at once: consumer distribution has moved online and needs fulfilment capacity; manufacturing investment has risen and needs floor space; and Kazakhstan’s position on the overland route between China and Europe puts more goods through its territory than existing facilities were built for.
Almaty as a logistics location
Almaty is Kazakhstan’s largest city and its principal commercial centre. Industrial activity is concentrated in a small number of corridors, including the Almaty Industrial Zone in the Alatau district of the city, which covers about 490 hectares.
Alatau district is an industrial zone, not a special economic zone
Alatau district in Almaty hosts the Almaty Industrial Zone. It is not a special economic zone. The special economic zone named Alatau is in Alatau City, a separate jurisdiction outside Almaty created in 2024. The two are frequently confused, including in English-language reporting, and the distinction matters for anything depending on the tax and customs regime that applies.
What Almaty Building owns and manages
The company owns and manages industrial and warehouse premises let to commercial tenants. Tenant identities, lease terms and floor areas are commercially confidential and are not published here; they are provided to counterparties and their advisers on request. See due-diligence requests.
What makes a site worth building on
A site is worth building on when its access, power and permitting are settled, and when it sits where demand will be rather than where it currently is. In Kazakhstan those conditions cluster around a small number of corridors: the Almaty industrial zone, the routes running to the Chinese border, and the industrial areas serving the larger cities.
Getting a site connected remains the slow part. Power capacity, road access and municipal approvals run on their own timetables, and they are the reason a project that looks straightforward on paper takes longer than its construction programme suggests. Choosing a location means choosing for where the traffic will be in ten years, which is an uncomfortable decision because it cannot be proved at the time. The discipline is to be explicit about what is being assumed rather than to present it as certainty.
Built to hold, not to sell
Industrial development in this market generally sits with the party that intends to hold the asset, rather than with a developer building to sell. That structure is common where the investor base is still forming and there is no deep pool of buyers for a completed and let building.
The consequence is that specification decisions are made by the eventual owner. An asset held for decades justifies spending more on the things that are expensive to change later — the slab, the power supply, the roof — and accepting a slower payback in exchange.
Sources
- Eurasian Development Bank — Warehouse Infrastructure in Eurasia: The Opportunity of the Decade, published 23 October 2025.
Last reviewed: 21 September 2026