When Lord Jason Stockwood, Britain's Minister of State for Investment, addressed an investor panel at the fifth Tashkent International Investment Forum (TIIF) in June, he was brimming with enthusiasm.

"It feels like this is a country in transition," he said. "The momentum, the energy, the vision that's happening is both profound and real."

The listing of the Uzbekistan National Investment Fund (UzNIF) in May has put Uzbekistan on the map and the reaction was immediate. Large European delegations made their way to TIIF, for the first time they had rolled out high level delegations to visit Uzbekistan annual flagship investment conference. The British delegation was headed by Lord Stockwood. A German delegation in town the same day went one better, led by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. And the US also sent a senior team to broker trade and investment deals. None of these delegations were at TIIF a year earlier.

 

It was the size of the UzNIF that sparked the interest. As IntelliNews reported from last year’s TIIF, the landmark IPO was organised by US investment managers Franklin Templeton, who structured the fund, the deal and found the cornerstone investors.

 

The IPO was a huge success, the biggest IPO on the LSE in the last year, and has whetted the appetite of international investors for more. In addition to UzNIF, the Uzbek government is intending to sell off a dozen of its leading companies and banks, of which Uzbekistan’s Navoi Mining and Metallurgical Company (NMMC), ranked fifth among the world's top gold producers, is the jewel in the crown and will raise billions of dollars when it finally comes to market.

 

The success of the UzNIF floatation marks a sharp turnaround from the first attempt to catch international investors’ attention with the so-called People’s IPO of UzAvto in 2023. Another one of Uzbekistan’s industrial jewels, that listing flopped as the valuation was set too high and the timing, listing over Thanksgiving, was terrible. But it seems this time round the government got everything right.

 

The London Stock Exchange debut marked a landmark development. It signifies a new phase in Uzbekistan’s economic transformation, as until now the county has been largely uninventable, with not significant equity or international bond issues.

And it only took five weeks to pass between the $603.6mn dual listing in London and Tashkent that attracted $2.8bn in investor demand and Lord Stockwood's visit.

The reality behind the rhetoric

The bankers can now smell money. “There are some bulge bracket investment banks here at this event that were not here a few years ago,” Oliver Hughes, the CEO of TBC Uzbekistan, the booming online banking business that turned unicorn last year with a valuation of over $1bn. “That is good news and we need them. But there is still a lot of work to do,” said Hughes, who was behind the success of Russia’s most successful online bank, Tinkoff Bank, until the war in Ukraine broke out.

However, the Europeans are a bit late into the game. IntelliNews has been reporting on the Uzbekistan economic boom since it started in 2018 after Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev liberal economic reform programme took hold. But investors are not only being pulled towards Tashkent as the first big money appears, they are being pushed out by the increasingly dysfunctional European economy. French and German industry are looking for new low-cost industrial production bases as the rising cost of energy increasingly makes their domestic industry uncompetitive. As Europe’s economic crisis deepens, the appeal of Uzbekistan which has reached a critical mass increases.

Lord Stockwood may be ebullient on Uzbekistan’s future, but official UK trade statistics paint a considerably more modest story. Uzbekistan was the UK's 77th largest trading partner in the twelve months to mid-2025, accounting for just 0.1% of total UK trade. Total UK exports to Uzbekistan stood at GBP453mn in the four quarters to June 2025 — a respectable 73.6% increase y/y, but starting from a tiny base.

The outward stock of UK foreign direct investment in Uzbekistan is not even published by the Office for National Statistics "due to data disclosure" — a technical phrase that means in practice the numbers involved are either too small to mention or too concentrated in just a handful of firms. The inward stock of Uzbek investment into the UK, by contrast, was a mere GBP13mn at the end of 2023 — less than 0.1% of total UK inward FDI, and probably largely made up of Uzbekistan’s richest businessmen buying houses in London.

In his interview at the forum, Stockwood acknowledged the scale of the gap directly while framing it as opportunity rather than failure. "Today trade is nearly GBP600mn," he said. "I mean, it started at about GBP60mn in 2016, so there's huge growth. But this is the start. These catalysing events that we're seeing here are a real opportunity for us to think about how we grow that into the tens of billions. Now that's the opportunity over the next decades."

"I think at the moment it's about having confidence in the overall system in Uzbekistan… The UzNIF transaction on the London Stock Exchange was the starting gun,” he added.

New Silk Road

Stockwood invoked Uzbekistan's position as a major waystation on the historic Silk Road. Now it has rewon that role as a key part of the Middle Corridor that links Asia to Europe overland.

"I think that's what we're seeing again, is Uzbekistan redefining itself as the centre of Central Asia. When we look at a crossroads between Europe and Asia and the Middle East, we want the UK to be a partner in that." Uzbekistan has become geopolitically important again in a way that it has been for a century when it was the stage for the legendary Great Game – a game played between Imperial Britain and Tsarist Russia and a game that is now being played out again. But Lord Stockwell admitted that the planning has not even got off square one.

"We spoke at length to the president yesterday about what are the initiatives that really work well for both countries," Stockwood said. "What we're going to do is we're going to go home — I'm flying home tomorrow — and within the next week we're going to work with our partners in the Uzbek government to build the next roadmap.”

But His Majesty’s government is talking to the right people; recent ministerial contact has flourished and Lord Stockwell has been meeting with Foreign Minister Bakhtiyor Saidov in London as recently as February, widely seen as one of the drivers of Uzbekistan's new open investment policies. The two have already signed a memorandum of understanding on healthcare cooperation aimed at developing pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity in Uzbekistan — alongside discussions covering industry, energy, infrastructure, agriculture and critical minerals. At the Tashkent forum itself, Stockwood's delegation included executives from UK Export Finance, Standard Chartered Bank, Sturgeon Capital, Endeavour Mining and BP — all of which have been very active in the previous boom in Russia.

The capital markets opening

One of the first big opportunities will be the development of Uzbekistan’s capital market which is getting underway. Several rounds of reforms have already been made to the Tashkent Stock Exchange (TSE) which was set up decades ago but it is now completely open to foreign investors, complete with minimum restrictions on the repatriation of profits.

But the UzNIF listing is a gamechanger. The fund, established by presidential decree in August 2024, holds strategic stakes of between 25 and 40% in 18 Uzbek state-owned enterprises spanning telecommunications, energy, banking, transportation and utilities. Its dual listing on May 13 — 23.4mn global depositary receipts priced at $25 each in London, alongside an ordinary share tranche on the TSE — raised $603.6mn, with the possibility of rising to $691mn if an over-allotment option is fully exercised in the coming month. The deal valued UzNIF at approximately $1.95bn and ranks as the largest London IPO of 2026 to date.

Julia Hoggett, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange Group, who was in Tashkent for TIIF, was unambiguous in linking the IPO's success to a wider strategic opportunity for both London and Tashkent.

"What we've seen in the London Stock Exchange with UzNIF is a real success story," she said. "A great success story, not just for Uzbekistan, but actually for the London market. It's performed incredibly well and it's a great shop window for everything that this country can do."

She framed the Exchange's ambitions explicitly: "We want to be the shop window for Uzbekistan to international investors. And so for not only state-owned enterprises, but for private companies that want access to liquidity, we want to be that place."

The LSE has a long history of promoting itself as a platform for Emerging Market listings. It aggressively pursued Russian corporates in the boom years of the noughties, holding regular Russia days in London and attracted many of the country’s leading names to London listings not only on the main market, but also to its Alternative Investment Market, for smaller companies with less rigorous listing rules. Indeed, in the early days of Russia’s transformation, the go-to investment forum was the Russia Economic Forum, held in the QEII centre over the road from Parliament, until the Kremlin took the event over and transformed it into St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in 1997, held at Lenexpo in the heart of the northern capital.

Hoggett was direct in dismissing the idea that market access itself remains an obstacle. "I think we've just seen with UzNIF that there isn't an obstacle to Uzbekistan entering global capital markets," she said. "They've just done so incredibly successfully. One of the issues is companies need to get to a certain scale and maturity and structure in order to be able to meet the demands of international markets."

The real test ahead, in her assessment, is whether private Uzbek companies — not just state-owned enterprises — follow UzNIF onto public markets. "The real test is not just whether you have state-owned enterprises listing. The real test is whether you then have private sector companies listing... I've met here who are so dynamic and produce really, really good products at great growth rates and have the opportunity to list in London as much as state-owned enterprises do."

UzNIF was a great start, but the privatisation programme has been going slowly so far. Banking sector privatisation was supposed to be a flagship for Uzbekistan's “third renaissance” proposed by Mirziyoyev in 2020, but few companies have been sold so far. Much more progress has been made in the energy sector transformation and several sector specific make over, with the privatisation of the cotton production sector being a standout example.

Asked to make the pitch for Uzbekistan over rival emerging markets in a single minute, Hoggett's answer reflected a sovereign rather than sectoral thesis.

"You have a growth in the underlying economy, you have a fundamental range of assets and natural resources, not just the natural resources that Uzbekistan has, but its people, and the dynamism and the growth of its population as well. Combine that with a really, really forward-looking, disciplined reform agenda that is delivering." She added: "A lot of the investment proposition for Uzbekistan is Uzbekistan itself... it's more about the value proposition of the country as a whole rather than any individual sector."

President Mirziyoyev used his keynote speech in TIIF’s plenary session to highlight five main directions for reforms, one of which focused on capital market development and continued privatisations.

A new international financial centre is going to be set up later this year, structured under a dedicated constitutional law operating on English common law principles, alongside tax incentives including corporate income tax, VAT, property tax and customs duty exemptions for an initial 50-year period.

The signal to British and other Western investors is unmistakable: Tashkent is constructing a regulatory environment explicitly designed to feel familiar to London-trained lawyers and fund managers and bring in more foreign investment.

For all the diplomatic bonhomie and the genuine interest by European investors in particular, the structural reality documented in UK government trade statistics has not yet caught up with the rhetoric on display in Tashkent. Uzbekistan has been largely ignored for most of the last three decades and worked hard to build up its economy using the considerable natural resources it has in agriculture and metallurgy. But the UzNIF IPO has changed the terms at a microeconomic level and the East-West clash at a geopolitical level. Moreover, the accession of Mirziyoyev himself as president in 2016 has also transformed regional politics from one of jealous rivals to regional cooperation. The five presidents of the so-called ‘Stans have taken to traveling in the so-called C5 format, dealing with the global superpowers as a unit for their mutual benefit. Work on a “Silk Road Shengen” is also underway as the creation of more mundane projects such as the Central Asian Energy Grid that goes beyond the region to include Azerbaijan and Afghanistan. But there is much work to do on all these ideas.