Kazakhstan’s wine sales fell 12% from January through August

Wine sales in Kazakhstan fell 12% year over year in January through August, while imported bottles took a larger share of the country’s available wine supplies as domestic production weakened more sharply than foreign shipments.

Data from Kazakhstan’s Bureau of National Statistics, cited on Tuesday by The Astana Times and in an Energyprom analysis published on Nov. 4, showed a broad contraction in the wine market. Domestic wine production dropped 17.2% from the same period a year earlier. Wine imports also declined, but by a smaller 2.2%, allowing foreign products to increase their relative weight in the market.

According to the data cited by Energyprom, the import share of wine in available market resources rose to 39% from 35.2% a year earlier, an increase of 3.8 percentage points. That change points to a shift in competitive position inside a shrinking market: imported wine lost volume, but local producers lost more.

The published figures did not include the absolute volume of wine sold, produced or imported that would allow the decline in sales to be expressed in liters. Because of that, the scale of the drop can be measured only in percentage terms from the material available in the reports.

Consumer prices also moved higher. Wine prices in Kazakhstan were 12.8% higher in September than a year earlier, according to the statistics cited in the reports. The broader alcohol category posted a 14.8% annual increase in September prices. The figures place the fall in wine sales alongside rising prices, but they do not by themselves show that higher prices caused the decline. The sales data cover January through August, while the price figures refer to September, and the reports did not provide a like-for-like monthly comparison for wine sales.

The wine data were part of a wider slowdown in Kazakhstan’s alcohol market. Beer sales fell 5% in January through August, and cognac sales dropped 41.9%, while vodka sales increased 4.5%, according to The Astana Times report. That mix suggests consumers may have shifted spending within the alcohol market rather than cutting consumption evenly across all categories.

Production and import trends in other segments also showed pressure. Cognac production fell 41.9% to 5.2 million liters, while cognac imports dropped 41.5%, leaving domestic producers with a 78.5% market share, according to Energyprom. Beer production declined 6% to 445 million liters, below domestic beer sales of 482.3 million liters. Beer imports consequently increased their share of available market resources to 10.4% from 10%, while beer exports fell 22.6%.

Household spending data cited in the same reports also indicated weaker demand. Spending on alcoholic beverages fell 4% in the first half of the year, continuing a downward trend, The Astana Times said.

For wine, the key movement was not an increase in import volumes but a rise in the import share inside a contracting market. Since domestic output fell much faster than imports, foreign products accounted for a larger portion of available supply even though imports themselves were lower than a year earlier.

The figures cited by The Astana Times came from secondary reporting based on official statistics, and the Energyprom analysis was also a secondary interpretation of data from the national statistics bureau. As with many operational statistics, the underlying numbers may later be revised. The import share measure also refers to available market resources rather than confirmed retail sales, a distinction that matters when judging how much of the market consumers actually bought at stores.