Uzbekistan's imports in 2025, up 18.5% in a year. National Statistics Committee of Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan: $47 billion of imports in 2025, 18.5% more than the year before. How to test demand for your product without leaving your country
Before entering a new region a manufacturer answers one question: will they buy what I make here. The usual way to answer it is with money. A stand, flights, a trip to a distributor, a year of an account manager's time. The answer arrives last, once the budget is gone. You can test demand earlier, before the first trip.
Does this market deserve the question
In 2025 Uzbekistan bought $47.35 billion of goods and services from abroad, 18.5% more than the year before. A third of that, $16.0 billion, was machinery and equipment, a category that grew 18.1% over the year. The figures come from the 21 January 2026 release of the National Statistics Committee of Uzbekistan, covering preliminary full-year 2025 data.
What that means for you. If you make industrial equipment, components, chemicals or building materials, this market has already spent a documented number in your category, and spent more of it than the year before. The question of whether there is money here is settled. The second question is whether any of it comes to you. The report does not answer that one.
The usual test returns a false no
That second question normally gets tested by reaching for the kit that works at home. LinkedIn, trade press, a stand at a regional show.
Here are the numbers for this market. Against a population of 37.2 million, Instagram has 14.1 million, according to DataReportal. Telegram has somewhere between 18 and 24 million, on an Insight Business estimate. LinkedIn has always been small in the region.
What that means for you. For six months you work a channel that few people here use, no letters arrive, and the conclusion writes itself: no demand, market not ready, strike it off. The market did not reject you. It never saw you. You got a negative answer to a question you never asked.
The same logic breaks the landing page. Someone who does hear about you goes to look at the site, and head office starts talking to them in another market's language. Why a new region gets its own site rather than a translation of the old one is a separate piece.
What a test worth believing looks like
It costs a fraction of the first trip's budget.
Your equipment goes in front of Uzbek buyers in Russian and Uzbek, on Telegram, Instagram and in search. Not an image campaign but a shop window: the range, prices, lead times, what happens with service and spare parts inside the country. A buyer needs five minutes with it to work out whether you suit them. Then traffic runs at that window for a few months.
Then you count. Distributors write or they do not. They ask about minimum order quantity or about whether service exists locally. Enquiries come from one city or from the whole country. They come from resellers or from plants. After a few months you are holding the market's behaviour in numbers rather than a consultant's opinion.
Silence is an answer too. It cost you one trip instead of a year, and you moved the money to a region where it works.
If the letters do come, everything downstream gets cheaper. You fly to the trade fair to meet people who already wrote to you, and the conversation at the stand does not start with who are you. Decisions about a representative, a warehouse and certification get made on numbers of your own rather than on a market presentation.
Artifact runs that test for foreign manufacturers and hands back a result you can put in front of a board: how many enquiries, from whom, and for which product lines.
The import figures behind this piece, who already supplies Uzbekistan and how certification works there: the Uzbekistan page.