OREANDA-NEWS. On 02 February 2009 was announced, that the business edition "Exclusive" published the rating of 50 best companies, which are doing their businesses in Kazakhstan. This project has been implemented by the research group over the five years and it included the pooling, focused group questionnaires among the senior and top level management.

JSC "Kazaktelecom" took the first position in the rating, the second one was taken by JSC "BTA Bank", and JSC "Kazkommertsbank" took the third one. Regarding JSC "Astana Finance", you can notice the considerable improvements. For example, based on financial results of the year of 2006 the Company was at the end of the rating list, for the year of 2007 it was able to go up to the 34th position. The last research noticed that "Astana Finance" was in the middle of the rating, being ahead of the following companies like JSC "Bank CenterCredit", "Narodnyi Bank of Kazakhstan", "Aliance Bank" and "Citi Bank Kazakhstan". Overall, the expert’s early estimates stated that the expectations on the market would have been a reduction in a number of commercial banks due to the evident reasons of liquidity crisis, deficit of foreign borrowings and so on, but, in opposite, their market share has been even increased and was marked by the appearance of two new institutions, RBS и Kookmin.

 The following companies have left their leading positions: Chevron, "Basis-А", "Belkamit", Resmi Group, "Kuat", "KazAtomProm", "Dastarkhan" network, Coca-Cola Almaty Bottlers and many others. To compare the current and past years, it is possible to say that the branch structure of company leaders has been changed. Retail business took the first position in the rating, which is followed by finance and food industry. Companies that are doing business in these three sectors are accounted for the largest market share, which is 63%. Last year, the second position has been taken by oil and gas industry, "the national honor", that showed a 12% market share. In 2008 its share dropped to the lowest value of 1,89%. It is almost clear that a number of construction companies have reduced to zero.

The situation looks worse for pension funds. Out of 755 questionnaire participants only 3 mentioned the pension funds in their questionnaires. In is interesting that earlier the number of domestic companies exceeded the foreign companies, in 2008 the world famous brand names like LG, Nokia, Google, Nissan appeared in the rating. That shows the weakening of competitiveness of domestic companies. For every company the average points were assigned on each criterion, and also the overall estimation has been done. Opinions about candidates were summed up from mass media, direct communication with the companies, clients’ feedbacks and partners’ responses, the reputation in the society. Such factors like company’s success, brand promotion (advertisement, rumors, PR), reputation of the company’s executives, and also mentioning a particular company in a non-commercial mass media have influenced the choice of the company.