One of the world’s largest mobile operators, British Vodafone, plans to enter the market of Uzbekistan. This was announced by entrepreneur Farhod Mamatjanov, founder of the textile company UzTex Group, the main shareholder of InfinBank and the owner of other businesses, during president Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s dialogue with businessmen in Nukus on 20 August.
“We started a project in a new area. You talked about digitalization at the meeting yesterday. To work at lightning speed, we need lightning-fast Internet. You called for attraction of a foreign brand. We started work to launch 5G Standalone mobile network in Uzbekistan together with one of the prominent companies in the world, British Vodafone,” he said.
“We privatized the Perfectum company… We studied this within the bank; to reach private entrepreneurs at the grassroots level, the bank needs the Internet. For this, in partnership with Uzcard (Uzbekistan's banking cards processing and payment system), we started a revolutionary plan — to launch Vodafone [in Uzbekistan]. God willing, [the project] will be launched in the coming year,” the entrepreneur said.
Farhod Mamatjanov said the investment volume will make up 250 million euros. The project is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2025, and should create 1,000 jobs.
Finnish Nokia will also participate in the project as a supplier of equipment and technologies.
“These technologies are already arriving, the installation is underway. To implement this project, we attracted 100 million euros of investments from the Finnish Export Agency through Uzpromstroibank. We are attracting 150 million euros ourselves as founders… Until now, there were foreign and state [mobile] companies [in Uzbekistan], now we are creating a national mobile operator,” he noted.
The businessman said that Vodafone “carefully studied Uzbekistan, its economic and political changes” before entering the market. The Emirates Telecommunications Group Company (e& — Etisalat and) — a technology group from the UAE — will also participate in the project as a technical partner, he said.
In October 2023, Uzbekistan’s Perfectum mobile operator said it had decided to implement 5G New Radio technology with participation of one of the world’s leading developers and manufacturers of mobile communication systems, Nokia.
In March, Perfectum was fully privatized and transferred to a new owner. The operator’s legal entity, Rubicon Wireless Communication LLC, is now 100% owned by businessman Abdumalik Iminov. Dmitry Shukov became the head of the company.
In 2020, the state announced plans to privatize the state share in Perfectum. At that time, 65% of the company was owned by the state, the rest belonged to Amis Protrade International. There have been no reports in open sources about the sale of shares in Perfectum.
In June, Perfectum entered into a partnership agreement with e& Group (Etisalat and) “to digitalize and transform the telecommunications ecosystem” of Uzbekistan. As part of this partnership, e& will support the creation of Perfectum’s new infrastructure based on 5G Standalone New Radio (5G SA NR) technology.
There are five GSM mobile operators in Uzbekistan: Mobiuz, Beeline, Humans, Uzmobile and Ucell. Perfectum has been providing CDMA mobile services. Radio frequencies of Uzbekistan mobile operators are standardized and distributed by the state commission on radio frequencies.
