Uzbekistan's communication and IT services reach UZS 77.6tn in nine months

Uzbekistan's communication and information services reached UZS 77,606.2 billion in January to September 2026, against UZS 61,722.8 billion a year earlier, a rise of 21.4 per cent in comparable prices, the National Statistics Committee said in a press release of 28 October.

The release gives values at current prices and growth rates at comparable prices, and says so in its notes. On the committee's values alone the sector grew by UZS 15,883.4 billion, or 25.7 per cent; the gap to 21.4 per cent is the price adjustment, and the release does not publish the index it used. Total market services reached UZS 1,003,197.6 billion, up 16.7 per cent, so communication and information services were 7.7 per cent of the total.

Among the categories the release lists, only financial services (22.0 per cent) and the small architecture, engineering and testing group (24.2 per cent) grew faster. The sector added 1.6 percentage points to the 16.7 per cent growth in market services, behind trade (4.0), financial services (3.4), transport (2.8) and accommodation and food (2.1).

Programming took two thirds of the increase

The committee splits the sector by type. Computer programming services were UZS 37,559.2 billion, or 48.4 per cent. Telecommunication services followed with 27.5 per cent, information services with 15.8 per cent, and publishing and other services with 6.1 and 2.2 per cent. The release's chart combines the last two into "other services".

Values are the release's; changes and the 2026 shares of the last row are calculated from them in current prices, so they sit above the committee's comparable-price rate. Programming added UZS 10,345.2 billion, 65 per cent of the sector's increase, while telecommunication added UZS 3,233.1 billion, 20 per cent. The release says the high share of programming "indicates that this direction plays an important role in the development of digital services". It names no companies and does not separate mobile, fixed or data-centre revenue within telecommunication.

The mix has been moving for months. The committee's release of 30 June, covering January to May, put the sector at UZS 39,024.8 billion, with programming at 46.1 per cent and telecommunication at 29.7 per cent. By September programming had gained 2.3 points of share and telecommunication had lost 2.2. In that release the category was called information and communication services, and in January to May programming grew 40.4 per cent and telecommunication 17.1 per cent in current prices, the same pattern as nine months. These shares are of services revenue; they are not the value-added shares in our earlier piece on ICT output, where telecoms stood at 28.9 per cent.

Reconciling the eight-month figure

Our report of 27 October used the committee's release of 12 October, which put the sector at UZS 71.4 trillion in January to August, up 21.2 per cent. On the evidence available, the two releases measure the same series. The committee's eight-month table of market services, as reported by UzDaily, lists communication and information technology services at UZS 71.4 trillion within a services total of UZS 908.6 trillion, and the nine-month table uses the same category inside the same total.

What the releases do not let a reader do is subtract. The eight-month release gave no type split and did not state the price basis of its growth rate, so the nine-month composition cannot be checked against it. Subtracting 71.4 from 77.6 implies about UZS 6.2 trillion for September alone, against an average of 8.9 trillion a month over the first eight months, or about 70 per cent of that pace. The same arithmetic on all market services gives UZS 94.6 trillion for September against a monthly average of 113.6 trillion, or 83 per cent.

The nine-month release calls its data preliminary and says its 2025 comparatives were revised for a new method of counting trade services. Neither release says whether September was a weak month or whether earlier months were revised. Readers should treat UZS 6.2 trillion as the output of the arithmetic, not as a published September figure, and use the cumulative totals. The January to September figures predate the mobile tariff rises that the competition committee began to review in October, so they show nothing of their effect.