Kazakhstan's companies for the first time has obtained internal ratings

/IRBIS, Nov.16, 99/ - According to REUTERS, which cites the agency director Bakhyt Kairakbai, Kazakhstan's rating agency "ABB-index" at the state economic conjuncture and analysis Center for the first time has conducted an internal rating of 120 largest industrial enterprises. Rating was made for the first and second quarters of the current year. Now the agency prepares rating for the third quarter. The financial and economic valuation proceeded from such factors as liquidity, profitability, solvency, and debts dynamics. According to the Bakhyt Kairakbai, total volume of Kazakhstan's enterprises non-payments has exceeded GDP (828.3 billion tenges for the first half-year of 1999). The highest rating has been received by the company manufacturing the driver's certificates and license plates, the second in the list is wine-vodka distillery, than there are utility enterprise, confectioner's shop and pharmaceutical factories. An absence in the "top ten" of the metallurgical and petroleum companies included in the "blue chips" program is explained "by the certain problems" of those enterprises. "Those enterprises, which we used to consider as the pillars of our economy, they are not there, where we should expect them", - has told Kairakbai. As he said, the agency together with the national statistics agency plan in the near future to conduct rating researches in the financial sector. "Ours four-phase rating procedure is similar to the Standard & Poors' system. Nevertheless it is an internal rating, it is impossible to extend it ton the international financial markets", - the director of rating agency has told.