— Over the last decade, Central Asia has moved from being seen as a transit corridor to being treated as a destination market in its own right. The region is home to around 85 million people, with a median age of 26.8 – one of the youngest populations in Eurasia.[1]

The growth data makes the case on its own. In 2025, the region's four reporting economies – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan – grew by more than 6%: the World Bank puts it at 6.2%, the Eurasian Development Bank at 6.6%. For comparison, the EDB projects around 1.6% growth for the United States and about 1.1% for the euro area in 2026.[2] The Kyrgyz Republic was the fastest-growing economy in the region at 10.3%, while Kazakhstan, the largest, expanded by about 5.9% on the back of Tengiz oil output, machinery manufacturing and energy.[3]

Uzbekistan is the clearest illustration of the shift. GDP grew 7.7% in 2025 and passed $145 billion for the first time; the country attracted more than $43 billion in foreign investment, and exports rose 24% to $33.8 billion.[4] That momentum carried into 2026: the economy grew 8.5% in the first half, investment reached roughly €24.6 billion, and Moody's raised the sovereign rating from Ba3 to Ba2 while Fitch moved its outlook to positive.[5]

Three forces are driving this.

First, reform. Uzbekistan liberalized its currency in 2017, opened its economy and built a public-private partnership framework in 2019 almost from scratch. You can see the results in projects that would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

Second, capital at real scale. At the Tashkent International Investment Forum in June 2026, ACWA Power put its total commitment to Uzbekistan at $25 billion by the end of the decade, having already invested over $15 billion since 2020, while Masdar now operates more than 2,000MW of solar and wind in the country.[6]

Third, connectivity. The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway, a $4.7 billion project scheduled for completion around 2030, is expected to handle up to 8 million tonnes of cargo a year and turn the Kyrgyz Republic into a genuine transit corridor between China and Europe.[7]

There's a useful headline number too: the EDB's June 2026 forecast has the region's economy surpassing the $600 billion mark for the first time in 2026, with growth above 6.5%.[8]

That's still a region-sized economy, not a global one. The trajectory is what makes it interesting, not the current size.

The caveats are real. Inflation stayed elevated through 2025 – around 12% in Kazakhstan, about 9% in the Kyrgyz Republic, 7–8% in Uzbekistan – and the World Bank expects regional growth to moderate to about 5.0% in 2026 and 4.6% in 2027 as the investment surge normalizes.[2] But even that cooling scenario leaves the region growing several times faster than the economies most global investors benchmark against.

— The New Tashkent International Airport. In July 2026, Uzbekistan Airports signed a 35-year concession with Saudi Arabia's Vision International Investment Company, Japan's Sojitz Corporation and South Korea's Incheon International Airport Corporation, with total project costs expected to exceed $2.5 billion and the airport scheduled to open in 2030.[9]

Five years ago, a deal with this kind of international consortium and long-dated concession simply wasn't on the table here.

Energy tells the same story. ACWA Power and Masdar are building solar, wind and storage capacity at significant scale, with the EBRD among the lenders, against a national target of 25GW of solar and wind by 2030.[12] Ten years ago the country was almost entirely fossil-fuel dependent.

Financial services just got a new frontier as well. Legislation introducing Islamic banking was adopted on 27 March 2026 and entered into force on 29 June 2026, creating a new segment of the financial market.[10]

Beyond the mega-projects, the more interesting shift for mid-sized companies is in retail, financial technology and consumer services, where currency convertibility, tax reform and a growing middle class have opened a market that used to be far harder to enter and repatriate profit from.

— Retail and financial services are the clearest cautionary tales, and it's worth being specific about the mechanism.

In retail, the record is unsentimental. Carrefour's stores in Uzbekistan were sold to Kazakhstan's Magnum in August 2023, and Magnum itself pulled out of the market by 2025, closing locations along the way.[11] International formats arrived assuming a level of format loyalty consumers didn't yet have, and the gap never closed. Meanwhile the chains that kept compounding were the ones that had never imported a format at all – they built around how people here actually shop and scaled patiently.

Financial services show a similar split. I've personally observed two fintech companies run into real difficulty after copying their business model wholesale from the European Union or the Middle East rather than treating it as a starting point. What's easy to miss from outside is that Uzbekistan has built its own national card payment infrastructure, deeply embedded in the country's payment ecosystem. You don't enter that ecosystem by ignoring it.

I'd rather not name the companies – this is an observation about a pattern, not a scorecard. The institutions that do best treat international best practice as a foundation rather than a template, and they tend to enter by acquiring or partnering with a business customers already trust, then building on top of it, instead of launching a foreign-branded operation from scratch. The same holds in e-commerce: the platforms that took the market built their logistics and pickup networks before they launched.

The pattern I see repeatedly:

• Assuming a model that works in the EU, the Gulf or another emerging market will transfer directly.
• Underestimating entrenched local infrastructure and consumer habits rather than building around them.
• Underinvesting in location, format and product decisions in favor of headline expansion numbers.
• Treating regulatory and relationship-building timelines as an afterthought rather than part of the core plan.

— Because the region isn't a single market, and even within one country consumer and financial behavior is shaped by infrastructure and habits that took years to form.

Payments are the cleanest illustration. A card proposition here is built on top of the national payment infrastructure, not beside it – and how people actually save, borrow and pay was shaped long before any foreign entrant arrived. The two fintech companies I mentioned ran into trouble not because EU or Middle East practice is irrelevant, but because they transplanted it directly instead of adapting it.

Global standards travel: quality, governance, safety, technology, compliance. Execution doesn't. Site selection, pricing architecture, partner selection, which payment rails you build around, even service language – all of it has to be built for the market you're actually in, not the one you came from.

— The pace and scale of what's actually happening. Most executives arrive with a picture of the region that's five or ten years out of date, and it takes a few months to recalibrate.

The second surprise is more consequential: how much local culture shapes everyday business life. Decision-making here tends to be communal and relationship-based. A serious commercial decision can involve input from senior family members or respected community figures who hold no formal role in the company at all, and consensus matters more than speed. Executives who don't factor that in misread a delay as inefficiency, when it's actually how trust gets built.

Local religious and cultural traditions also shape the rhythm of business – working patterns, scheduling, the pace of relationship-building. Companies do better when they treat those as part of the operating model rather than a side detail.

Western business training optimizes for directness, speed and formal process; local business culture places more weight on relationship, patience and saving face on all sides. Raising your voice, even when justified, damages standing rather than resolving anything. Executives who try to move at the speed of a mature Western market before trust exists hit friction that looks like bureaucracy but is usually a mismatch between two different, equally legitimate ways of doing business.

— Consistency, humility and genuine curiosity about how things actually work locally – not how they're assumed to work. The leaders who succeed spend real time listening before they start restructuring, and treat local expertise as something to incorporate rather than override.

Concretely: show deference to age and seniority the way the culture expects, participate genuinely in hospitality rather than treating it as a formality, and plan around important cultural and religious rhythms. None of that is complicated, but it has to be sincere – people notice quickly when respect is performative.

Given how fast the region's capital markets and regulatory environment are moving, I'd add adaptability and active stakeholder management: keeping investors, regulators, partners and local teams aligned as the rules shift under a project's feet.

Stay tuned for the second part, where we'll explore what international executives need to know about working in Central Asia – from culture and trust to leadership, local teams, and adapting to a new business environment.