HE Rustam Karimjonov, Vice Minister of Digital Technologies of Uzbekistan
Doha, Qatar: Qatar and Uzbekistan’s Information Technology (IT) sector is paving way for strategic partnership and opening new growth avenues.
In an exclusive interview with The Peninsula on the sidelines of the Web Summit Qatar 2025, yesterday, H E Rustam Karimjonov, Vice Minister of Digital Technologies of Uzbekistan highlighted the huge potential for growth and collaboration between both the countries in tech services ecosystem and ways to boost it.
“We have a historic day for cooperation between Uzbekistan and Qatar for developing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector and work together on achieving goals under the Digital Uzbekistan 2030 Strategy and Qatar Digital Agenda 2030. Both countries are opening up to the world and developing a lot in all the sectors but specifically in ICT sector and we have very ambitious goals,” Karimjonov said.
For Web Summit Qatar 2025, “we brought more than 50 people from Uzbekistan, around 20 startups and IT companies to work with Qatari government and IT ecosystem in this region. Qatar is becoming a regional hub in the Middle East and North Africa region, and we want to support this.”
Qatar has huge experience in technological advancements in terms of the financial services and the country has the government’s support. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan has a big asset talent pool with a population of 37 million and the average 65% of population is under 30 years old.
“Together we plan to provide outsourcing services and talent pool for global IT solutions which will be executed through Qatar to other regions or vice versa. We will bring the top consultants and ICT companies from Qatar to Uzbekistan to do outsourcing from Uzbekistan to other countries, and this is kind of mutual beneficial cooperation between us. By combining our efforts together, we can achieve very good results,” he added.
Vice Minister of Digital Technologies further said, the startup ecosystem is booming a lot in Uzbekistan which is very similar to Qatar. “This is one of the reasons we brought more than 50 people from Uzbekistan to explore and enter this market. Many companies have already registered here and doing business through Qatar. So, I think it’s a perfect match.”
“We have also discussed the potential billion-dollar agreements in the future to take local production, innovations in IT solutions from Uzbekistan which is done locally by using Qatari expertise for global markets and expand the local services we have from Uzbekistan,” Karimjonov added.
The Minister reiterated, for the last five years, in Uzbekistan the IT sector is booming because of the huge talent pool and more than 1000 foreign IT companies are doing outsourcing; 50,000 highly qualified IT Uzbek specialists are working for those foreign companies. He added, “We had only $10m of IT service experts five years ago but last year we reached almost $1bn that is 100 times increase, which is a huge leap. It will continue to increase more because of this global cooperation. Under the Digital Uzbekistan 2030 Strategy, he noted “we are planning to achieve $5bn of IT service expert."
