TBC Bank's Uzbek unit weighs its own IPO after a state fund drew four times its raise in London

Covered about 4.1 times, May's order book left roughly $2.1 billion of bids without stock ^[14][15]. The next Uzbek issuers will look to that surplus first. An order book is a stack of bids, though. If some accounts asked for more than they wanted because they expected to be scaled back, the spare demand is smaller than $2.1 billion.

What the buyers got matters as much as how many turned up. The fund holds minority stakes in state-owned companies ^[8], so the government raised outside money while keeping control, in an economy where the IMF put state enterprise assets at more than 100% of GDP at the end of 2024 ^[11]. The $690 million equals about 16% of the 2025 foreign direct investment figure ^[18], although listed portfolio stakes and direct investment are different kinds of money. Direct investment itself rose 91% in four years, about 18% a year compounded ^[16][17].

Nika Kurdiani runs the TBC unit that is weighing the listing ^[6]. "The biggest risk the country has is the sustainability of all those reforms and the consistency of their implementation," he said ^[1]. Dakota Irvin, an analyst at Lamplighter, said: "Uzbekistan's state bureaucracy remains conservative and averse to change, and there are signs that some investors are experiencing delays or difficulty in getting projects off the ground" ^[3]. Leonard Kwan of T. Rowe Price, which is overweight Uzbekistan, took the other side: "The reforms have been meaningful in our view, and they are much more open towards market practices," he said ^[9].

According to the report, investors see little risk of a return to the closed economy of the past, and their focus is whether reforms become institutionalised ^[2]. That leaves pace and enforcement as the risk. The report does not include a size, venue or date for the TBC listing, or a valuation or bond spread that would show what investors charge for that risk ^[5].

The evidence fits more than one outcome. The next books could fill at cover close to May's and the queue clears. Delays of the kind Irvin describes could push deals back until Moody's acts on the rating ^[13]. Or the state could keep selling minority slices of its own companies while privately owned issuers wait.

In my view the harder test is a foreign-owned issuer such as TBC Uzbekistan, whose shareholders would depend on Uzbek law to protect them ^[5][4]. The counter-case is T. Rowe Price's overweight position and a book four times the deal size, which show large buyers already paying for Uzbek state assets under the current rules ^[9][14]. The view is wrong if a TBC book, when it comes, is covered as heavily as the fund's ^[5][14].