In the space of six weeks this spring, Uzbekistan delivered two transactions that were gamechangers for the country’s image and starter’s guns for the privatisation process. One was a straightforward sale of a state asset to a strategic buyer. The other was the country's first international stock market listing. Both mark a genuine inflection point for the Uzbek privatisation programme.

"I can't think of any other geography which has been so active and so successful like Uzbekistan in attracting foreign investments so far," said Giovanni Salvetti, head of the CIS region at Rothschild & Co, moderating a panel at the fifth annual Tashkent International Investment Forum (TIIF 2026) on June 18.

For most of the last three decades, Uzbekistan has been a closed economy run on similar lines to its socialist past where the state plays the leading role in the economy. But since Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took over in 2016, he has thrown the country open to foreign investors as part of the third renaissance, launched in 2020. Despite the ambitious plans, Mirziyoyev has proven to be a cautious leader and taken only small steps when it comes to selling off state assets. Until now.

The strategic sale: Mobiuz

The first major transaction was the sale of the state's 100% stake in Universal Mobile Systems, the mobile operator known by its brand name Mobiuz. The State Assets Management Agency selected a consortium led by US-based McKim and Company, with participation from JVR Enterprises, in a deal valuing the telecoms operator at $351mn — corresponding to an EV/EBITDA multiple of 7.4 times, which the agency described as reflecting "the high efficiency of the deal." The buyers have separately committed to invest up to $500mn in modernising Uzbekistan's telecommunications infrastructure, taking the transaction's total value toward $850mn.

Murodov Sokhibjon, director of the State Assets Management Agency, told the panel that the deal ranked among the largest in Uzbekistan's privatisation history, behind only the 2024 sale of the state's stake in Coca-Cola Içecek's local operations for $252mn, the landmark debut of the Mirziyoyev administration’s privatisation programme.

"We did not expect that we will have such a deal after Coca-Cola," he said. Rothschild & Co served as lead strategic and financial advisor on the transaction, with KPMG handling due diligence and Deloitte providing independent valuation — the same model of heavyweight international advisory support the government has now applied across its largest disposals as another Mirziyoyev innovation after earlier experiments, such as the “people’s IPO” listing for UzAvto in 2023 went awry. A similar model saw US fund managers Franklin Templeton organise the highly successful IPO of Uzbekistan National Investment Fund (UzNIF) in May.

After UzNIF created a buzz in the international capital markets, the government is now looking to pick up the pace. A new privatisation law, adopted in 2024 to replace legislation dating to 1991, expanded the permitted disposal methods from two — exchange or auction — to eight draws on international precedents. Decisions on which assets go to strategic sale versus public listing rest with a presidential decree under what is formally known as Privatisation Programme No. 70, which also sets out the incentive structure available to bidders: discounts of up to 14% for full upfront payment, instalment options for buyers who prefer to pay over time, and the ability to post the acquired asset itself as collateral.

The pipeline behind Mobiuz is substantial. Sokhibjon pointed to forthcoming disposals across energy — including thermal power plants — automotive, infrastructure and financial services, with banks and insurance companies now explicitly included for the first time. Other officials have separately confirmed that UzAuto, the petrochemical producer Navoiyazot, and a tranche of thermal power assets are advancing through preparation in 2026. Mirziyoyev has set a target of reducing the state's share of the economy from its current 42%, using what he described as modern digital and analytical tools, including AI-assisted financial monitoring of remaining state enterprises.

The stock market route

Handing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) over to private ownership is good for business, but Mirziyoyev has also taken advantage of the selloffs to push reforms of the capital markets that are running in parallel.

The IPO of UzNIF raised approximately $700mn through a dual listing of global depositary receipts on the London Stock Exchange and ordinary shares on the Tashkent Stock Exchange — the country's first international equity offering, and, according to David Gottlieb of Cleary Gottlieb, who led the legal work, the first dual listing of its kind completed in under nine months from a standing start.

The structural achievement was making 13 separate state assets — including Uzbekistan Airways, the fund's largest single holding — investable as a single diversified instrument, professionally managed by Franklin Templeton and subjected to international disclosure and governance standards. Uzbekistan has been growing by over 6% every year for the last decade (apart from in the pandemic pause year of 2020) but until now interested investors have had almost no way to buy exposure to this explosive growth story. That just changed.

"You can take in Uzbekistan a portfolio of state-owned assets, you can put it into a structure that's professionally managed, you can subject it to international disclosure standards and governance expectations, and you can attract serious global institutional capital as well as local demand," Gottlieb said.

Exposure to Uzbekistan is long overdue. The London tranche was four times oversubscribed; the Tashkent tranche, despite its far smaller absolute size, was oversubscribed by 50%, reflecting genuine domestic retail and frontier-fund appetite for direct local access. The GDRs, priced at $25, were trading above $30 within weeks.

Gottlieb credited the speed of execution to a "regulatory sandbox" approach — testing legal frameworks through presidential decree ahead of full legislation, a method Uzbekistan has previously applied in banking and fintech.

Three decrees underpinned the transaction: one in December 2025 establishing the legal status of GDR depositories and enabling fungibility between depositary receipts and underlying shares; a second in April 2026 facilitating the dual listing mechanics directly; and a third creating, for the first time in an Uzbek privatisation, a legal framework for a "green shoe" stabilisation option — the standard market mechanism that allows underwriters to support a new listing's price in its first trading days, which prior privatisation law had not permitted.

Kodirjon Norov of Highland Capital Partners, whose firm participated in structuring the local tranche, situated the deal against the development of Tashkent's own exchange: daily trades have risen from around 300 five years ago to roughly 5,000 today, with UzNIF alone adding more than 7,000 new brokerage accounts to a market that previously had only 15,000 active. "For a country with a population of 38mn, we can see how huge the potential is," he said.

What comes next

Both deal types are now expected to recur at scale. Sokhibjon said a further round of strategic sales, spanning energy and financial services, will follow the current investment forum. Evgeny Gaisev of Morgan Stanley argued that achieving sufficient free float to secure MSCI emerging-market index inclusion — a threshold that could draw $20-40bn in passive inflows even at a 1-2% index weighting — should now be the explicit medium-term objective for Uzbek issuers. The governement is also talking to Clearstream about inclusion in its international settlement and clearing system that would allow Tashkent to be traded from the comfort of trading desks in London and New York.

Norov confirmed that Uzbekistan Airways is expected to follow UzNIF as the next celebratory Uzbek IPO within the year, as the first of the fund's 13 underlying assets to pursue its own standalone listing.

Tomer Pinkusiewicz of Gibson Dunn, asked why so many American investors had appeared in Tashkent this year, offered an explanation that doubled as a verdict on the programme as a whole: "It's a real testament to the country... the ambition, the vision, and really the opportunities that exist for people to deploy real capital."

Whether that capital continues to arrive, he and others on the panel agreed, will depend less on any single transaction than on whether Uzbekistan keeps closing the deals it announces — the discipline, as one panellist put it, of following through.