Deal Man In The Stans

Private equity investor Aidan Karibzhanov is chasing riches in the rough-and-tumble former Soviet Republics of Central Asia.

- Nariman Gizitdinov, photographs by Petr Antonov

From the second-floor balcony of his spacious hillside home in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Aidan Karibzhanov takes stock of his sprawling empire, which stretches over some of the world’s most resource-rich and politically challenging territory. He looks out at the high-rise headquarters his Visor Holding investment firm shares with the Ritz-Carlton hotel. To the southwest, beyond the snowcapped Trans-Ili Alatau mountains, Visor owns Kyrgyzstan’s top grocery chain, and Karibzhanov has invested more than $200 million in that country’s second-largest gold mine. Closer to home, Visor owns a cement plant and an oil company in Karibzhanov’s native Kazakhstan.

In the past decade, Karibzhanov, 43, has emerged as an investing power in a region ripe with both potential and peril. He’s focused his efforts on the five roughand-tumble former Soviet republics known collectively as the Stans: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The Stans may be home to only 68 million people, but they sit on about 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, 11 percent of its natural gas, and 14 percent of its uranium. And they grew at the China-like annual pace of 8.1 percent from 2001, when Karibzhanov founded Visor, through 2014, according to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

“Visor Holding is absolutely a key player in the region,” says Ian McCall, a money manager at Geneva-based emerging-markets investor Quesnell Capital. “The firm showed the biggest breadth and number of deals to us, whether it was in mining or oil and gas.”