Azerbaijan`s economy development started with energy sector, and this sector is the most attractive for foreign investments, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said during his speech at the meeting of the World Economic Forum, which began in Baku on Monday.

"Our main objective now is to diversify our economy," President Aliyev said.

He said in order to do it, Azerbaijan needs to present itself to the world, the business community, not only as country with important geographical location and natural resources, but also as a country committed to reforms, committed to transformation, and to diversification.

President said Azerbaijan is relatively young, and it only has 21 years of independence.
"But Azerbaijan is a country of great history, traditions and culture. I am sure our guests will have a chance also to know more about Azerbaijan," he underscored.

President Aliyev said that the country`s independence had only less than 2 years of experience. "And the situation in Azerbaijan at that time, I think, was the worst in post-Soviet period. We had internal clashes, that was a time of civil war, that was a time of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which ended in occupation of 20 percent of our internationally recognized territories," he said.

"And actually 1993 was a turning point for development, because after mid-1993, the situation started to stabilize, we started to implement very serious, radical political and economic reforms, and Azerbaijan started to present itself to the International community. That was a beginning of transformation from the planned economy to the market economy, from one-party system to multi-party system, from totalitarism to democracy," he said.

He said 20 years, of course, is not a very big period, from historic point of view, but at the same time this period was a real period of transformation.

According to the President, Azerbaijan managed in the beginning of its reforms, to attract major energy companies for investing in Azerbaijan.
"We managed, at a later stage, to transform direction of economic development from energy to non-energy sector, and attract investors in sectors which are not related to oil and gas," he said.

President Aliyev said at the same time, Azerbaijan continued with political and economic reforms and these processes are continuing now, and that will create good opportunities for sustainable development of Azerbaijan in the coming years.

"We have a very advantageous geographical location, and without infrastructure this location doesn`t mean a lot. We have natural resources, and we`ve built already diversified transportation network for our hydrocarbons," he underlined.

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