In 2025, Meruert Zholdybayeva, a member of the board of directors of Aktau International Airport, received nearly 31 million tenge in payments from the company. This came amid the airline's loss-making operations: the loss from continuing operations for the year amounted to 315.7 million tenge, compared with a profit of 616.5 million tenge a year earlier, reports infohub.kz.
Zholdybayeva has been on the board since September 2021. Over four years, her annual remuneration grew by a total of 6.3%, or 1.8 million tenge. In total, from 2022 to 2025, the top manager was paid 119.2 million tenge, including: in 2022 – 29,141,786 tenge, in 2023 – 29,060,613 tenge, in 2024 – 30,053,303 tenge, and in 2025 – 30,986,835 tenge. On average, this amounts to about 2.58 million tenge per month.
The airport's slide into the red was driven by a 16.1% drop in gross profit (from 933.9 million to 783.9 million tenge) and a sharp rise in costs. In 2025, administrative expenses increased by 34% to 817.8 million tenge, while other operating expenses grew by 52.1% to 188.1 million tenge. Additional pressure came from financial expenses of 351.2 million tenge, which were absent in 2024. These were only partially offset by financial income of 226.3 million tenge.
Assets of Aktau International Airport grew by 4.7 billion tenge to 15.8 billion tenge by the end of 2025. At the same time, the company's liabilities increased by 5.1 billion tenge to 8.2 billion tenge.
Since 2008, the airport has been under the trust management of Turkish holding YDA Holding. During the investor's tenure, annual passenger traffic has grown from 360,000 to 1.2 million people. By 2030, the holding plans to increase cargo traffic through Aktau from 3,000 to 100,000 tons per year. In Kazakhstan, YDA Holding also participated in the construction of Turkistan airport.