BIOGRAPHY

Bobur Islamov serves as Minister of Mining Industry and Geology of the Republic of Uzbekistan. He leads the Ministry's work on the 2026–2030 exploration program, the transition to AI-enabled geology, and the critical minerals strategy launched under President Mirziyoyev's March 2025 initiative.

Which critical elements are priority for the next 24 months for international partners?

President Mirziyoyev's March 2025 initiative covers 76 projects across 28 critical elements. The priority list is defined by global industrial demand: tungsten, molybdenum, rhenium, selenium, tellurium, graphite, lithium, vanadium and titanium. The direction is set by the energy transition, electric transport, digital technologies and industrial decarbonization, all of which require secure and diversified supplies. Our choice of elements follows this shift directly. What we are building goes well beyond extraction. The policy target is a full value-added chain, from the deposit to processing and on to finished products, which is the only way the country captures the real economic value of its resources.

For investors this means a different scale of project. Extraction remains central, but processing capacity, metallurgy and downstream manufacturing are where the next decade of returns will be generated. The conditions we are creating to make international partners genuine participants are specific. Licensing gives exploration investors a priority right to develop the deposits they discover. Junior company support mechanisms have been introduced. Environmental standards have been tightened. Licenses can be treated as an economic asset. Investors receive a transparent and predictable framework that rewards the risk they take at the exploration stage with a strategic position in the processing chain.

More: https://invest.miit.uz/document/services/portal/The Investor Interviews docs/BOBUR ISLAMOV/0fbb85d171a64702ad5803341b388ceeMinister Mining.pdf