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Uzbekistan has agreed in principle to eliminate customs duties on imported mobile phones as part of its ongoing accession negotiations with the World Trade Organization, a senior customs official announced at a press conference in Tashkent on 11 November. The zero-rate commitment has already been agreed with other WTO member states, according to Farkhod Olimjonov, head of a department at the Customs Committee.
Olimjonov said the removal of the tariff could reduce retail prices for mobile handsets by roughly five percent. The trade-off, however, is a projected fall in state budget revenues of between 300 billion and 400 billion soums annually — a significant sum given that customs receipts from mobile-device imports already reached 2 trillion soums in the first ten months of 2026 alone, more than double the figure for the same period a year earlier.
The official was careful to distinguish between the customs duty and other levies. Value-added tax will continue to apply to imported handsets, meaning the devices will not be entirely tax-free at the border — only the specific import tariff will be removed.
A Market Already Growing Fast
The backdrop to the policy change is a sharp rise in formal imports. Between January and October 2026, Uzbekistan officially recorded the import of 4.1 million mobile devices — one million more than in the equivalent period of the previous year. The growth in iPhone imports was particularly striking: more than 452,000 Apple handsets entered the country through official channels in those ten months, generating 756.6 billion soums in customs payments, a figure 6.2 times higher than the year-earlier comparison.
The surge in declared imports reflects a broader shift toward formal trade channels, which makes the timing of the tariff concession consequential. Eliminating the duty at a moment when official import volumes — and the revenues they generate — are rising steeply means the budget cost of the WTO commitment will be felt more acutely than it might have been in earlier years.
The WTO Accession Context
Uzbekistan has been negotiating WTO membership for several years, a process that requires bilateral tariff agreements with existing members across a wide range of product categories. The mobile-phone rate is one of those agreed lines. Once the country formally joins the organisation, the zero rate on handsets will become a binding commitment rather than a domestic policy choice, limiting future governments’ ability to reintroduce the duty as a revenue or industrial-protection measure. The precise timeline for accession was not specified at the press conference.