Page 60 - bne Magazine Apri20

60 I Eurasia bne April 2020
The Almalyk mining company, one of the biggest companies in the country, has been provisionally listed for privatisation.
COMMENT: Uzbek government preparing to privatise some of its industrial crown jewels
Fiezullah Saidov in Tashkent
Uzbek reform rhetoric is moving
to a practical phase with the large- scale strategy prepared by the State Asset Management Agency (SAMA).
It intends to sell 100% in 1,117 companies, mostly state-owned banks, bazaars, enterprises of the oil and gas sectors, cooking oil companies and alcohol producers.
However, the partial privatisation list includes some of the crown jewels of Uzbek industry, such as nation’s biggest gold mine, the Navoi Mining and the diversified minging company, Almalyk Mining.
Also on the list is the state-owned telecom’s monopolist Uzbektelecom, the national carrier Uzbekistan Airways, the state-owned oil and gas company Uzbekneftegaz, the mobile operator Coscom and more.
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The state is keeping a few cards in its hand and certain companies will not be privatsed, such as Uzbekistan Railways, the strategically important National
In addition to the privatisation list, there is another more modest list where SAMA is hoping to attract strategic investors
to make foreign direct investments in
“The initial privatisation list has enough of the really valuable company on it to generate real interest from strategic international investors”
Bank for Foreign Economic Activities and banks that have social projects such as AgroBank, UzAvtoSanoat.
However, the initial privatisation list has enough of the really valuable company on it to generate real interest from strategic international investors to make the auctions highly attractive and get the ball rolling.
the companies under a public private partnership structure. These are mostly social enterprises.
There is also a long list of state-owned companies that will simply be liquidated, sold for their a real estate, or be incorporated from purely state bodies. Uzbekistan, unlike Russia and Kazakhstan and other ex-Soviet