AZCON Holding: Key goal is preparing entities for privatization

One of the main targets of AZCON Holding is ultimately to bring entities operating in the transport, telecommunications, and digital sectors to a state of readiness for privatization, Executive Director Shahin Babayev said in an interview with Report.

He added that AZCON Holding is an entity that centralizes transport, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure into a single ecosystem: "Our main goal is to ensure the institutional development of these entities, to increase their operational efficiency and competitiveness. There were a number of important factors that necessitated the establishment of the Holding. The first factor was related to the excessively high financial burden on the state budget. Various payments of both subsidy and investment nature were made from the state budget to the entities under the Holding's supervision, and the main issue was to increase the efficiency of these payments. The primary objective here was to ensure more effective use of those subsidies, the return of allocated investment funds, and their more efficient reflection in terms of revenue volume."

Babayev noted that the next issue was aligning the targets of the entities with the country's strategically important priorities in the transport and telecommunications sector: "As a result of this process, unified targets have already been established within the Holding for each direction, and our main aspiration is to ensure that these entities make a greater contribution to the country's economic growth. This is a natural process, and it is understandable that the entities previously pursued their individual targets independently."

According to him, the third important factor is related to those entities' access to financial sources: "Financial resources were attracted by those entities individually within certain limitations, and there were such large investment projects that their implementation became difficult on an individual basis."