"We changed the factory's working hours from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. However, this doesn't help much because it gets dark by 4:00 PM, and we have to turn on the lights in the factory," said Marat Bakkulov, founder and owner of the Almaty Fan Factory, to his Facebook followers. "Now the lighting needs to be redone; the overhead lights are blinding. Workers get tired, productivity has dropped, and defects have increased. This means more rework and, consequently, losses. Redesigning the lighting also incurs losses, and these are direct. I want to tell the 'proposers': at least calculate the consequences first before making decisions."
The businessman mentioned that he considered moving the start of the workday at the factory to 7:00 AM and ending at 4:00 PM. "I thought about it, but there are problems," Bakkulov wrote on Facebook. "In our country, there is a high birth rate, and most of my employees have school-aged and preschool children, which means they need to drop them off at kindergartens and schools. Very few will want to arrive at 7:00 AM; it's easier to change jobs, as some of my employees did when we moved [the start of the workday] to 8:00 AM. About 20% simply quit. And at 7:00 AM, there will ultimately be no one to work at the factory, and it's not just about those who like to sleep in. The children are more important."
The businessman also described another issue: most companies operate from 9:00 AM, and clients of AVZ and banks are also open from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. "By limiting our working hours to 4:00 PM, we risk being left without orders," Bakkulov lamented. "We tried to stagger office and production hours—some from 9:00 AM, others from 8:00 AM. Problems arose because supply stopped receiving timely information from production, as did accounting and sales departments. This caused an imbalance."
Thus, according to the head of AVZ, the time change has brought many problems for the enterprise, which "produces goods worth 500–800 million tenge per month."
"Although it seems to me that they don't care about us, since [oil] pumps don’t need daylight," Bakkulov mused, likely referring to the officials who decided to change the time. "But if Trump fulfills his promise and drops oil prices to $40, maybe we will become relevant, and our opinion will matter."
Erkin Tatishev, co-owner and chairman of the board of directors of Kusto Group, shared his thoughts on the time change in Kazakhstan with his Instagram followers. "Our planet rotates, and thanks to this, we have day and night. To organize time across the Earth, it was divided into 24 time zones: each hour corresponds to 15° of longitude. Time is measured from the prime meridian, which runs through Greenwich, England, and that’s how the world agreed to measure time," the businessman wrote. "In our country, the situation with time zones could be simpler and more convenient. The western regions are approximately on the 46th meridian, which, by global standards, falls into the UTC+4 zone. The eastern regions are closer to the 87th meridian, corresponding to UTC+6. The central regions—somewhere between the 60th and 75th meridians—fall under UTC+5. Thus, it makes sense for our country to have three time zones: one for the western regions, another for the central, and a third for the eastern. This is logical and convenient because then the time corresponds to where the sun is in the sky."
Tatishev argues that if the time is shifted one hour forward, as it was recently, this creates problems. "This leads to higher electricity consumption, and consequently, increased electricity bills. Estimates show that this loss of electricity on a national scale can amount to between 2 to 5 billion kilowatt-hours per year! That's a lot," the businessman asserts. "The benefits of switching to permanent winter time are clear. People will live according to the natural rhythm of day and night, saving electricity and money on bills. For instance, in Almaty, the sun will set around 5:00 PM in winter and around 9:30 PM in summer. This way, people can spend more time in natural light, especially in summer when sunsets are late."
The businessman concludes that if we return to permanent winter time and establish three time zones, it will help save money, better utilize natural light, and reduce electricity consumption. "We will live in greater harmony with nature, and the country will save energy resources—this is beneficial for everyone," Tatishev concluded.