— 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 numbers explain why: the five countries together are home to roughly 80–85 million people, one of the youngest and fastest-growing populations anywhere in Eurasia, with a median age under 27.

The growth data makes the case on its own. In 2025, Central Asia’s combined economy (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) expanded by more than 6% – the World Bank puts it at 6.2%, the Eurasian Development Bank at 6.6%. For comparison, the EDB projects roughly 1.6% growth in the US and 1.1% in the eurozone for 2026. Kyrgyzstan was the fastest-growing economy in the region at 10.3% in 2025. Kazakhstan, the region’s largest economy, grew around 5.9%, driven by oil output at Tengiz and a genuine push into manufacturing and metallurgy.

Uzbekistan’s own numbers are the clearest illustration of the shift. GDP grew 7.7% in 2025, taking the economy past $147 billion – up from $115 billion the year before and well ahead of the government’s own 6% forecast. Foreign direct investment jumped 46.9% and now accounts for over 40% of all capital investment; exports grew 24%. That momentum has carried into 2026: the economy grew 8.5% in the first half of the year, investment reached $28 billion, and Fitch and Moody’s each upgraded Uzbekistan’s sovereign credit rating by a notch. The Ministry of Economy and Finance has since revised its full-year 2026 forecast up to 8.1% growth, with GDP expected to approach $180 billion – the president has publicly pushed ministries to aim even higher, toward 9–10%.

Three forces are driving this. First, reform. Uzbekistan liberalized its currency in 2017, opened its economy, and built a genuine PPP framework in 2019 almost from scratch – you can see the results in projects that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. Second, capital is moving in at real scale. At the Tashkent International Investment Forum in June 2026, Gulf developers ACWA Power and Masdar disclosed combined committed capital in Uzbekistan’s green energy sector alone well beyond $20 billion – ACWA has invested more than $15 billion since entering in 2020 and is heading toward $25 billion by the end of the decade, which would make Uzbekistan its second-largest market globally after Saudi Arabia. Third, connectivity. The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway – a $4.7 billion, 532-kilometre linefrom Kashgar to Andijan – is now under active construction, with completion targeted between 2028 and 2030. It will cut roughly 900 kilometres and 7–8 days off the freight route between China and Europe.

There’s a useful headline number here too. The Eurasian Development Bank’s June 2026 macro forecast put Central Asia’s combined GDP above $600 billion for the first time – up from $519 billion in 2024 – with growth exceeding 6.5% in 2026, led again by Kyrgyzstan at 10.2%, Tajikistan at 8.3%, and Uzbekistan at 7.9%. Analysts at the EDB and elsewhere project the region crossing $700 billion by 2030 and reaching the $1 trillion mark somewhere between 2032 and 2036 if current growth rates hold.

That’s still a region-sized economy today, not a global one – but the trajectory is what makes it interesting, not the current size.

Put together: reform-minded governments, real capital deployment, double-digit growth in FDI and exports, and new physical connectivity. That combination is rare, and investors have noticed.

Economists do flag real caveats – inflation stayed elevated across the region in 2025, around 12% in Kazakhstan and roughly 7–8% in Uzbekistan. Central banks in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan have kept policy rates high to manage it, and the World Bank expects regional growth to moderate to about 5% in 2026 and 4.6% in 2027 as the current investment surge normalizes. But even a “cooling” scenario still leaves Central Asia growing several times faster than the economies most global investors are used to benchmarking against.

— The clearest example right now is the New Tashkent International Airport. In June 2026, Uzbekistan Airports signed a 35-year PPP with a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Vision Invest (45%), alongside Japan’s Sojitz Corporation (30%) and South Korea’s Incheon International Airport Corporation (15%). It’s a genuine greenfield build – a 1,310-hectare site, roughly $2.5 billion for phase one, designed to eventually handle up to 46 million passengers a year. Five years ago, a deal structured with this kind of international consortium and long-dated concession simply wasn’t on the table in Uzbekistan.

Energy tells the same story. ACWA Power and Masdar are now building solar, wind, storage, and even green hydrogen capacity at gigawatt scale, financed by the EBRD, ADB, AIIB, and the World Bank alongside their own balance sheets. Ten years ago Uzbekistan was almost entirely fossil-fuel dependent; today it’s targeting 40% renewables by 2030 and is arguably Central Asia’s green energy champion.

Financial services just got a genuinely new frontier, too. On 27 March 2026, President Mirziyoyev signed a law establishing the legal framework for Islamic banking in Uzbekistan, which took effect on 29 June 2026 – the first time the country has had a dedicated legal basis for sharia-compliant banking, including tax code amendments exempting Islamic finance markups from VAT.

Given Uzbekistan is a majority-Muslim country of nearly 40 million people, I’d expect this to become one of the more interesting growth stories in financial services over the next five years. The Central Bank expects at least one “Islamic window” at a commercial bank this year, three state banks preparing similar windows, and two fully Islamic banks by 2030, with more than ten credit institutions already preparing to enter the space and officials targeting roughly $1 billion in additional investment and deposits by 2030.

IMAN Holding is a good example of a domestic player positioning early – it’s built IMANUM, a halal fintech ecosystem now used by over 60,000 clients for sharia-compliant trade and real estate investment, and has already secured a Central Bank license to open a microfinance institution as a stepping stone toward becoming Uzbekistan’s first dedicated Islamic bank. I expect Gulf players, who understand this asset class deeply, to move into the market alongside domestic entrants like IMAN over the next few years.

Beyond the mega-projects, the more interesting shift for mid-sized companies is in retail, fintech, and consumer services, where currency convertibility, tax reform, and a genuinely 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 rather than abstract about it – and worth pairing each struggle with the domestic players who got it right, because the contrast is where the real lesson sits.

In retail, it’s important to be fair: this wasn’t a case of some players failing and one succeeding. Carrefour and Magnum both struggled and ultimately exited, and even Makro Asia – a local player, not a foreign entrant – scaled too fast across eight different store formats and had to close a number of stores in 2023–2024 to rebuild around two core formats and local food culture.

Meanwhile, Korzinka, Uzbekistan’s own pioneer in modern retail, simply kept compounding: it now operates over 250 stores, holds a market share more than four times its nearest competitor in modern grocery, and in 2025 closed a $110 million equity raise led by Omani and Abu Dhabi sovereign investors, on top of tripling its footprint since the EBRD first backed it in 2020. Korzinka didn’t import a format – it built one for bazaar-habituated shoppers from day one and scaled it patiently over three decades.

Financial services show a similar split, and the domestic winners here are genuinely instructive for foreign entrants. I’ve personally observed two fintech companies in Uzbekistan run into real difficulty after trying to copy their business model wholesale from the EU or the Middle East, rather than treating it as a starting point to adapt.

What’s easy to miss coming from outside is that Uzbekistan has built its own national card payment infrastructure, Uzcard and Humo, which together issue the overwhelming majority of cards in the country and are genuinely unique systems in their own right, not a variant of anything else. It’s a similar story in a handful of other countries that built distinct national card systems of their own – China’s UnionPay, Germany’s girocard, France’s Cartes Bancaires – each shaped by its own regulatory history and consumer habits rather than any single global template.

I’d rather not name the two companies – this is really an observation about a pattern, not a scorecard. But the lesson I’d draw is simple: it’s far better to bring genuine best practice from the EU or elsewhere and adapt it deliberately to local realities than to import a model unchanged and hope it fits.

I’ve seen that same lesson play out with at least one foreign-owned bank too. The institutions that do best are the ones that treat European best practice as a foundation to build on, not a template to replicate as-is.

What the pattern looks like when it’s done right is TBC Uzbekistan, part of the London-listed TBC Bank Group. It entered in 2019 by acquiring a controlling stake in the local payments app Payme rather than launching a foreign-branded bank from scratch, then layered a purpose-built digital bank, TBC UZ, on top in 2020.

That local-infrastructure-first approach is a large part of why TBC Uzbekistan reached profitability just two years after launch – a record among global digital banks – and now serves more than 22 million unique registered users, over half the country’s population, with 2025 net profit of 581 billion soums on operating income up 64%.

Payme itself, still central to that ecosystem, is one of the country’s leading digital payment platforms.

And on the e-commerce side, Uzum – often described as Uzbekistan’s answer to Amazon – built its own logistics network and pickup infrastructure before it ever launched its marketplace in 2022, precisely because it understood Uzbek consumers were skipping traditional offline retail entirely and jumping straight to mobile commerce.

It became the country’s first unicorn in 2024 at a $1.16 billion valuation and now controls roughly 45% of Uzbekistan’s e-commerce market.

The pattern I see repeatedly, across sectors:

• Assuming a business model that works in the EU, the Gulf, or another emerging market will transfer directly.
• Underestimating entrenched local infrastructure, such as bazaars in retail or Uzcard and Humo in payments, rather than building around it.
• Underinvesting in location, format, or 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 and won’t be displaced by a familiar international model alone.

Makro’s own trajectory is the clearest illustration precisely because it wasn’t a straightforward success story. Its early growth came from importing a broad, multi-format retail approach; that had to be dismantled and rebuilt around local food culture and bazaar-competitive pricing before it actually worked. Carrefour and Magnum brought international retail formats and assumed a level of format loyalty Uzbek consumers didn’t yet have, and never fully closed that gap before exiting.

Korzinka and Uzum, by contrast, never tried to import a foreign template in the first place – Korzinka built its own multi-format model around Uzbek shopping habits from 1996 onward, and Uzum built its own logistics and delivery infrastructure before launching its marketplace, betting correctly that Uzbek consumers would skip the offline-retail stage altogether and go straight to mobile commerce. Both are now the clear category leaders.

Fintech tells the same story with a cleaner mechanism. Uzbekistan has built its own distinct national card system in Uzcard and Humo, much as China built UnionPay, Germany built girocard, and France built Cartes Bancaires – none of these are variations on a shared international model; each is its own system, shaped by its own market’s history and habits.

The two fintech companies I mentioned ran into trouble not because EU or Middle East practices are irrelevant, but because they tried to transplant them directly rather than adapting them to that local infrastructure and to how Uzbek consumers actually save, borrow, and pay. The better approach – and the one the more established foreign-owned bank I’ve observed eventually settled on – is to bring genuine international best practice and deliberately localize it, rather than either ignoring it or copying it unchanged.

The lesson holds across sectors: global standards, yes – quality, governance, safety, technology, compliance. But execution – site selection, pricing architecture, partner selection, which payment infrastructure you build around, even service language – has to be built for the market you’re actually in, not the one you came from.

— The next five to ten years will likely be defined by connectivity and energy transition happening at the same time, on top of a growth base that’s already running at 6–10% across the region.

Uzbekistan’s economy has roughly doubled in dollar terms in the space of a decade, and GDP per capita has nearly doubled in the last nine years – that kind of compounding, sustained even at a more moderate pace, changes what’s viable to build here. The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway is expected to open between 2028 and 2030, and Uzbekistan alone is targeting 25 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2030, up from roughly 2.3 GW of solar capacity at the end of 2024.

That’s an extraordinary build-out rate.

I’d expect the following sectors to lead:

• Renewable energy and green hydrogen
• Transport and logistics corridors, including rail, air, and the Middle Corridor more broadly
• Fintech, digital payments, and Islamic finance
• Infrastructure and PPP-structured projects, particularly aviation, healthcare, and utilities
• Agribusiness and food processing
• Data centers and digital infrastructure

The New Tashkent Airport and the CKU railway are useful bellwethers: both involve genuinely international consortiums, long-dated concessions, and multilateral development bank financing – a level of project sophistication that simply didn’t exist in the region a decade ago. I expect that structure to become the norm rather than the exception.

Capital markets are the other big story, and it happened faster than most people expected. In May 2026, the Uzbekistan National Investment Fund (UzNIF) – which holds minority stakes of 25–40% in 13 state-owned companies spanning transport, energy, telecoms, utilities, and banking, including Uzbekistan Airways and Uzbektelecom – completed a dual listing on the London and Tashkent stock exchanges, raising over $600 million at a roughly $1.95 billion valuation.

It was more than four times oversubscribed, with cornerstone commitments from BlackRock, Franklin Resources, and Redwheel.

Franklin Templeton, which manages well over $1 trillion in global assets, has run the fund since 2024 and led the governance transformation of the underlying companies – appointing independent directors and restructuring boards – that made the listing credible to international investors in the first place.

It’s the first international equity listing to come out of Uzbekistan, and I’d expect it to be the first of several as the government continues privatizing state assets through the stock market rather than one-off sales.

I’d also point to two regional shifts that don’t get enough attention outside the region itself.

The first is Azerbaijan’s deepening integration with Central Asia.

What used to be an informal “C5” consultative format among the five Central Asian states has effectively become a “C6”: at the Cholpon-Ata summit at the end of July 2026, Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev took part for the first time as a full member rather than a guest, following the decision made at the 7th summit in Tashkent in November 2025.

Azerbaijan–Central Asia trade is still relatively modest – around $425 million in the first half of 2026 – but the trajectory matters more than the current number: the Zangezur Corridor and the Middle Corridor together are turning Azerbaijan into the natural extension of Central Asia’s transport network toward Europe and Turkey, and I’d expect capital flows to follow the trade corridors over the next few years.

The second is Uzbekistan’s opening toward Afghanistan, which is a genuinely underappreciated opportunity. Uzbekistan and Afghanistan signed a preferential trade agreement at the Tashkent International Investment Forum in June 2025, ratified by President Mirziyoyev in March 2026, which zeroes out tariffs on 14 product categories, simplifies phytosanitary certification for Afghan agricultural exports, and moved the Hairatan–Termez crossing to round-the-clock operation – Tashkent’s stated target is $5 billion in bilateral trade within five years.

Alongside that, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are jointly developing the roughly 760-kilometre Trans-Afghan Railway, which is expected to cut delivery times to Pakistani ports by about five days and transport costs by more than 40% once built; feasibility work moved into an active phase in mid-2026.

It’s a higher-risk, longer-horizon opportunity than most of what I’ve described here, but for companies in logistics, trade finance, and agribusiness willing to take a longer view, it’s one of the more interesting frontiers opening up in the region right now.

— Treat it as a long-term strategic market, not a short-term opportunity – and do your homework on specific cases before you commit.

Magnum’s exit after 3.5 years, and Makro’s own 2023 restructuring, are both genuinely useful case studies precisely because neither company lacked capability; they underestimated how different Uzbekistan’s consumer and infrastructure realities were from what they’d built their models around.

Study the winners just as closely: Korzinka, TBC Uzbekistan and Payme, and Uzum didn’t succeed by importing a foreign playbook – they built for the market as it actually is.

Concretely: spend real time on the ground before signing anything. Map the local infrastructure you’ll actually be competing with or building on – whether that’s bazaars in retail or Uzcard and Humo in payments – rather than assuming your home-market default applies.

Build relationships with regulators and local partners before you need them. Invest in local talent early.

Keep your global standards on quality and governance, but be genuinely willing to rebuild your go-to-market approach around how the local market actually behaves, not how you’d like it to behave.

The companies and investors succeeding right now – ACWA Power, Masdar, the airport consortium, Korzinka, TBC Uzbekistan, Uzum, and the state-owned companies now attracting global capital through UzNIF – share one thing in common: they’ve committed capital and time at a scale that signals they’re staying.

And the ones actually gaining ground are the ones that built or rebuilt their execution around the market rather than expecting the market to adapt to them.

Central Asia is no longer an emerging opportunity to watch from a distance. On current trajectories, it becomes a trillion-dollar regional economy sometime in the early-to-mid 2030s, up from around $600 billion today and just $350 billion a decade ago.

It’s a market that international business can’t afford to overlook – but it rewards patience and punishes assumptions.