On the electronic trading platform portal, 573 decommissioned buses were sold at auction in Almaty.
According to the portal, the city’s Almatyelectrotrans bus depot put up the vehicles, which were classified as scrap, with a starting price of 93.3 million tenge. The guarantee deposit was 13.9 million tenge. Ultimately, the buyer will pay 160.3 million tenge for the buses.
“Dismantling to scrap condition (if necessary) is carried out outside the seller’s storage area, by the participant recognised as the winner, at their own expense. Year of acquisition: 2010. Information on serviceability: unfit for service,” states the lot description.
The decommissioned transport mainly consists of buses of the brands Man, Youngman, Yutong, Golden Dragon, PAZ and LiAZ, manufactured between 2010 and 2018. The winner of the competition must independently remove the purchased property within 60 days.
It is worth recalling that in July 2023, in the village of Zhetigen, Almaty region, residents of Kazakhstan discovered a “bus graveyard”. At the time, Almaty residents were outraged that hundreds of buses, which had recently been running on city routes, were sitting idle while the city faced a shortage of transport.
For its part, the Almatyelectrotrans bus depot reported that following the Head of State’s instruction on the need to switch to environmentally friendly types of transport running on gas or electric power, a decision was made in 2022 to transfer the diesel buses to the balance of the Almaty region akimat.
It later emerged that the bus depot had paid hundreds of millions of budget funds for the transport of the vehicles and the land where they were sitting idle. The media reported that Almatyelectrotrans LLP had entered into an agreement with the company Zhanarna LTD for the transportation of 595 buses for the sum of 89 million tenge.