Yerkin Tatishev

YERKIN TATISHEV

Yerkin Tatishev is the Founding Chairman of the Kusto Group, a Singapore-based industrial holding with an annual turnover of more than $1bn. Born in Kazakhstan in 1976, Yerkin Tatishev came of age in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. In 1998, at the age of just 22, while studying at Moscow State Management University, Yerkin and a group of entrepreneurial colleagues set their sights on transforming a local mining and manufacturing enterprise. The endeavour became a success story of transformation in difficult circumstances, and it was around this time that the idea of Kusto Group was born.

Outside of building Kusto Group into a multi-national, multi-sector entity, Yerkin has pursued a range of business, cultural and philanthropic projects. He set up the Yerzhan Tatishev Foundation in 2005, named in honour of his late brother, which awards educational grants for young people. Yerkin is committed to preparing the next generation of Kazakhstan’s leaders, and is passionate about education, innovation and entrepreneurship, and recently founded the High Tech Academy in Almaty, Kazakhstan, one of the first Project Based Learning schools in Central Asia.

Yerkin is married with five children and speaks English, Kazakh and Russian. He cites Mandela, Tolstoy, Ghandi and Muhammad Ali amongst his political and sporting heroes.

KUSTO GROUP

Kusto Group is a multi-billion dollar industrial holding which invests in and produces innovative and reliable manufacturing products across multiple sectors, including agribusiness, construction materials, oil & gas, and real estate.

Kusto, like Yerkin, was born in Kazakhstan, following a time where the country experienced under-investment and mismanagement causing significant damage to the country’s infrastructure and industries. In this environment, Yerkin saw the chance to innovate. Growing from its Kazakh origins, Kusto Group expanded into a pan-Asian conglomerate, as a result of Yerkin and the teams pioneering methods of investment, management and commitment to a distinct set of values. The experience of successfully working in partnership with local communities, in an unpredictable and transitional economy beset with structural and social challenges, helped establish core values which came to characterise the Kusto Group, becoming part of its DNA.