My Honest Advice to the Business World: Come to Tashkent

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — The call came in mid-March 2026. A friend — a seasoned businessman with substantial interests across Dubai — was direct: “The region feels different this time. Where do I go?” Without a moment's hesitation, I said: Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Over the following two weeks, more than a dozen other Dubai-based businessmen called with the same question. Trading houses, finance and holding companies anchored in the Dubai International Financial Centre, management consultancies, e-commerce operations, professional services firms — men who had built their lives around the assumption that Dubai was permanent, stable, and rational. My answer to every one of them was identical. And what struck me was this: nearly 70% endorsed my humble suggestion that Uzbekistan is independently drawn by its infrastructure momentum, its energy, and above all, the extraordinary quality of life in Tashkent. They are right. Let me tell you why.

The Middle East has been a geography of conflict since antiquity. What is unfolding in early 2026 is not a temporary disruption — it is the latest convulsion of a region whose political contradictions, sectarian fractures, and great-power rivalries have defied resolution for generations and show every indication of intensifying for decades more. Capital, always the most rational of actors, reads this clearly. The flight from Dubai is not panicked. It is pattern recognition. Dubai built its miracle on the proposition that it could remain an island of stability in an ocean of instability. That proposition is under stress, it has not previously faced. When businessmen who have spent careers reading regional risk begin calling simultaneously to ask where to go next, the signal is unambiguous.

Uzbekistan is, to those who have not visited, a surprise. To those who know it, it is the most logical destination on earth for serious capital, serious intellect, and serious ambition. I say this not as a detached analyst, but as an engineer who has worked across continents — and as a man who carries a quiet romance for this country and its people. That personal connection aside, let me speak plainly as a businessman: the infrastructure is already in place. The ease of doing business has been systematically engineered. And the hospitality? It is not a marketing slogan here. It is an inbuilt, instinctive quality of life.

Before we talk about the future, let us remember the past. Uzbekistan is not a newcomer to global commerce. It is the beating heart of the Silk Road — the ancient superhighway of ideas, goods, and culture. Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva: these names are not mere tourist destinations. They are monuments to a thousand years of trade, scholarship, and Islamic enlightenment. The tilework of Registan, the celestial instruments of Ulugh Beg’s observatory, the caravanserais that once welcomed merchants from Persia to China — this is not history locked in a museum. It is a living identity of openness. When I walk through the blue-domed streets of Samarkand, I am reminded: this land taught the world how to host strangers, how to negotiate across difference, how to turn geography into opportunity. That DNA never left. It has simply been modernized.

Under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev since 2016, Uzbekistan has executed one of the most disciplined and consequential national transformation programs in the world. The approach is straightforwardly pragmatic: open foreign policy, good-neighbourly relations with every Central Asian state, strategic partnerships with Russia, China, Turkey, and the United States simultaneously, and complete non-alignment with military blocs. In a world of forced binary choices, Uzbekistan has chosen none of them — and prospered precisely because of it. The economic results are not rhetorical. GDP grew at 7.7% in 2025, driven by gold prices, surging investment, and rising domestic incomes. Nominal GDP is estimated at $147 to $159 billion in 2025–2026. As of March 1, 2026, gold and foreign exchange reserves reached $77.08 billion — with gold comprising approximately 85% of total reserves, placing Uzbekistan among the world’s top ten gold producers. These reserves sit well above IMF adequacy benchmarks, providing import coverage that most emerging economies cannot approach. The World Bank has identified Uzbekistan as one of the five fastest-growing economies across the Europe and Central Asia region. Its stated goal — upper-middle-income status by 2030 — is not an aspiration. It is a trajectory.

When my Dubai contacts ask specifically about where to base themselves, I tell them about Yangi Toshkent — New Tashkent — and watch the conversation change. The $15 billion, 25,000-hectare New Tashkent project is designed to expand the capital and accommodate 2.5 million additional residents. It is conceived not as a real estate development but as a systems project: smart infrastructure, AI-driven public services, green energy integration, and sustainability frameworks embedded from the foundation up. It is, in the language of urban planning, a city built for the century it will actually inhabit — not retrofitted to it. For the businesses my friends operate — trading, finance, consulting, e-commerce, professional services — Tashkent offers something Dubai increasingly cannot: a rational, stable, green, and genuinely livable operating environment, at a cost structure that makes the DIFC look extravagant. For the intellectuals, engineers, scientists, software designers, and thinkers among them, Tashkent offers something rarer still: a city with the texture of deep civilisation beneath its modern ambition.

The standard objection to Uzbekistan as a commercial hub has always been its geography: doubly landlocked, no direct sea access, dependent on transit routes through multiple sovereign territories. It is an objection that is rapidly becoming obsolete. The Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan railway project — connecting the Uzbek rail network via Termiz, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Logar in Afghanistan to Pakistan through the Kharlachi border crossing in Kurram — is among the most consequential infrastructure initiatives in Eurasian economic history. The 760-kilometre railroad is projected for completion by the end of 2027, with freight capacity reaching 15 million tonnes annually by 2030. Uzbekistan's own estimates indicate it will reduce cargo delivery times between Uzbekistan and Pakistan by five days and cut freight costs by at least 40 percent. Studies on the broader southern corridor suggest logistics cost reductions of 20 to 30 percent compared to traditional northern routes. The destination at the end of this corridor is Karachi, Pakistan's principal port on the Arabian Sea. For a doubly landlocked country that has historically routed exports through Russia or China, direct railway access to a major deepwater port changes the fundamental economics of Uzbek trade. It also changes Tashkent's position in global supply chains from peripheral to pivotal. Uzbekistan's engagement with Afghanistan to make this happen is itself a masterclass in pragmatic statecraft. Rather than isolation or condemnation, Tashkent has pursued dialogue, economic cooperation, electricity exports under 25-year contracts, the Airitom Free Zone enabling visa-free cross-border trade, and the Termez cargo centre as a bilateral commercial hub. The result is a transit corridor being built through a country most of the world has written off — because Uzbekistan understood that economic integration is a more durable stabilisation tool than sanctions.

Let me speak as an engineer: systems work when they are designed. Uzbekistan has systematically redesigned its business environment. Visa-free or e-visa access for over 90 countries. Currency convertibility introduced in 2017 — a game-changer. Tax reforms reducing the burden on small and medium enterprises. Digital government services are cutting registration time from weeks to days. Free economic zones with land, tax, and customs incentives. The World Bank’s Doing Business indicators — before the report was discontinued — showed Uzbekistan as one of the top global reformers. And from personal experience? I have registered a business entity in Tashkent faster than I could open a corporate bank account in London.

But numbers and logistics, however compelling, are not what stay with you about Uzbekistan. What stays is the country itself. The snow-capped Tian Shan mountains. The vast, red-sanded Kyzylkum Desert. The Charvak Reservoir — an alpine lake of startling clarity set against mountain ridgelines. And then the cities: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva — their intricate tilework glowing under a sun that seems to favour this land. More than the landscape, it is the people. Humble. Hospitable to the point of reflex. Safe. In a world where anxiety has become a currency, Uzbekistan remains genuinely peaceful. I have walked its streets late at night, travelled its highways, sat in its chaikhanas (tea houses), and never once felt the edge of tension that accompanies so much of modern urban life. This is not a marketing claim. It is my personal experience. Repeatedly.

I am not asking the world to visit Uzbekistan. I am asking the world’s businessmen — the ones who read risk, who move capital, who build enterprises — to relocate a centre of gravity to Tashkent. The Middle East will always have its place. But the next decade does not belong to cities that are straining under their own success. It belongs to places with room to grow, peace to offer, and governments smart enough to get out of the way while building the rails, roads, and digital infrastructure that commerce demands. That place, today, is Uzbekistan. And the capital of that future is Tashkent. Come. See for yourself. The tea is hot, the welcome is real, and the opportunity is larger than any skyline you will leave behind.

Engineer Arshad H. Abbasi is a water, energy, governance, and climate change expert.  He has advised governments, development institutions, and private sector clients on water resources, disaster risk, and environmental governance across South and Central Asia. Engineer Abbasi writes on the intersection of earth sciences, engineering, and public policy.