— 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.[1]

The growth data makes the case on its own. In 2025, Central Asia’s combined economy – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – expanded by more than 6%. The World Bank puts growth at 6.2%, while the Eurasian Development Bank estimates 6.6%.[2] 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.[3]

Uzbekistan’s own numbers are the clearest illustration of the shift. GDP (gross domestic product) grew 7.7% in 2025, taking the economy past $147 billion, up from $115 billion the year before. Foreign direct investment (FDI) reached over $43 billion in 2025, representing a record level for the country; exports grew 24%.[4]

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.[5]

Three forces are driving this.

First, reform. Uzbekistan liberalized its currency in 2017, opened its economy, and built a genuine public-private partnership (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 significant commitments to Uzbekistan’s green energy sector.[6]

Third, connectivity. The China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway – a $4.7 billion, approximately 523-kilometre line from Kashgar to Andijan – is now under active construction, with completion targeted between 2028 and 2030. It is expected to cut at least 7–8 days off the freight route between China and Europe. [7]

There’s a useful headline number here too. The Eurasian Development Bank (EDB)’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.[8] 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.[9]

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, strong 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, central banks have kept policy rates high to manage it, and the World Bank expects regional growth to moderate as the current investment surge normalizes.[2] 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 public-private partnership with a consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Vision Invest, alongside Japan’s Sojitz Corporation and South Korea’s Incheon International Airport Corporation. It’s a genuine large-scale international infrastructure project, with roughly $2.5 billion planned for the first phase and the airport scheduled to open in 2030.[10]

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 green hydrogen capacity at significant scale, financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the World Bank alongside their own balance sheets.[6]

Ten years ago Uzbekistan was almost entirely fossil-fuel dependent. Today it is targeting a significant increase in renewable energy capacity by 2030, making the country one of the most active renewable energy markets in Central Asia.[17]

Financial services just got a genuinely new frontier, too. On 27 March 2026, Uzbekistan adopted legislation establishing a legal framework for Islamic banking, which took effect on 29 June 2026.[11] This creates a new segment of the financial market and opens additional opportunities for financial institutions and investors.

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 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, a local player rather than a foreign entrant, scaled too fast across different store formats and had to close a number of stores in 2023/2024 to rebuild around core formats and local food culture.[12]

Meanwhile Korzinka, Uzbekistan’s own pioneer in modern retail, simply kept compounding. In 2025, the company attracted up to $110 million from new investors, while the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) noted that the retailer had tripled its number of stores during the Bank’s time as a shareholder.[13]

Korzinka didn’t import a format – it built one around local shopping habits and scaled it patiently over time.

Financial services show a similar split. I’ve personally observed two fintech companies in Uzbekistan run into real difficulty after trying to copy their business model wholesale from the European Union (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 are deeply integrated into the country’s payment ecosystem.[14]

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 foreign-owned financial institutions too – the institutions that do best are the ones that treat international 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, which 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.[15]

That local-infrastructure-first approach is a large part of why TBC Uzbekistan reached profitability just two years after launch. It now serves more than 22 million unique registered users, representing more than half of Uzbekistan’s population. In 2025, the ecosystem reported net profit of 581 billion soums, with operating income up 64%.[15]

And on the e-commerce side, Uzum built its own logistics network and pickup infrastructure before launching its marketplace in 2022, precisely because it understood Uzbek consumers were moving quickly toward mobile commerce. It became the country's first unicorn in 2024 with a valuation of over $1 billion.[16]

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 and consumer habits rather than building around them.
• 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 competitive pricing before it actually worked.[12]

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 – they built their models around local shopping habits and infrastructure.[12][16]

Financial technology tells the same story with a cleaner mechanism. Uzbekistan has built its own distinct national card system in Uzcard and Humo, shaped by its own market’s history and habits.[14]

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 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 biggest surprise is usually 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 them a few months to recalibrate against what’s now a market attracting significant capital across energy, infrastructure and logistics.

The second, and honestly the more consequential surprise, is how much local culture shapes everyday business life here – far more than in many markets executives are coming from.

This isn’t a footnote; it belongs in every company’s operating model, not just its onboarding materials. Decision-making in Central Asia tends to be more communal and relationship-based than what many executives are used to. A serious commercial decision can genuinely involve input from senior family members or respected community figures who hold no formal role in the company at all, and consensus-building matters more than speed.

Executives who don’t factor that in can misread a delay as inefficiency when it’s actually a necessary step in how trust and agreement are built here.

Local religious and cultural traditions can also influence the rhythm of business, including working patterns, scheduling and relationship-building. Companies operating in the region do better when they approach local customs with genuine sensitivity and respect, rather than treating them as a side detail.

The practical challenge for most international executives is that Western business training optimizes for directness, speed and formal process, while local business culture often places greater emphasis on relationship, patience and saving face on all sides.

Raising your voice or showing visible frustration, even when justified, tends to damage standing rather than resolve the issue. Executives who try to move at the speed of a mature Western market before trust and relationships exist tend to hit friction that looks like bureaucracy but is often really 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 are the ones who spend real time listening before they start restructuring, and who treat local expertise as something to be incorporated rather than overridden.

Concretely, that means visibly respecting the things that matter locally – showing deference to age and seniority the way the culture expects, participating genuinely in hospitality rather than treating it as a formality to get through, and being conscious of important cultural and religious rhythms when planning work.

None of that is complicated, but it has to be sincere; people notice quickly when respect for local custom is performative rather than real.

Given how fast the region’s capital markets and regulatory environment are moving right now, I’d add adaptability and active stakeholder management to that list – the ability to keep investors, regulators, partners and local teams aligned as the rules and opportunities shift under a project’s feet.