SEOUL, August 26 (AJP) - A standing consultative body of industry ministers will anchor the economic agenda when South Korea hosts the leaders of five Central Asian countries in Seoul next month, giving a relationship built largely on separate bilateral deals its first permanent multilateral working channel.
The first Korea-Central Asia Summit, set for Sept. 16 and 17, puts industrial modernization, infrastructure, critical minerals and energy, workforce training and private-sector participation at the center of the agenda.
The C5+Korea Industry Ministers' Meeting is designed to keep sectoral talks running between leaders' meetings, identify joint initiatives and maintain a list of priority projects that links each area to specific partners and sources of financing.
In materials setting out Tashkent's approach to the summit, the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Seoul said Uzbekistan enters the new regional format with elements of the industrial agenda already operating inside its bilateral relationship with South Korea.
The two countries have held what both governments describe as a special strategic partnership since 2019, a designation that places South Korea in Uzbekistan's highest tier of diplomatic relationships.
Cumulative South Korean direct investment in the Uzbek economy has passed $8 billion, according to the embassy. Bilateral trade approached $1 billion in the first half of 2026, up 11.5 percent from the same period a year earlier.
Behind those figures sits a network of joint institutions rather than a trade balance. Uzbekistan hosts Korean-linked centers in textiles, rare metals and alloys, agricultural machinery and e-government, and cooperation has extended into chemical technologies and construction.
Their function is to move engineering methods, technical knowledge and production experience across, not finished goods.
Critical minerals are where the summit agenda and Uzbekistan's own industrial plans overlap most directly.
The metals and rare earth elements that go into batteries, semiconductors and defense equipment, and the processing steps that turn raw ore into usable input are the part most countries cannot do alone.
Uzbekistan already runs the Uzbek-Korean Scientific and Technological Center for Rare Metals and Alloys, which works on materials science, processing technologies, research and specialist training with the aim of moving those results into industrial production.
More sophisticated industry raises the demands placed on everything around it. Within the summit agenda, infrastructure covers energy, industrial complexes, transport and logistics, and urban systems, and it extends across the full life of a project, from planning and construction through modernization and operation.
For an investor, that means an industrial site can be assessed together with the power, engineering and logistics needed to run it.
Financing for projects on that scale already exists in part. The cooperation program between Uzbekistan and the Economic Development Cooperation Fund, South Korea's concessional lending arm for developing countries, has been set at $2 billion for 2024 through 2027.
A new portfolio of initiatives is under preparation, and the two sides are examining financing without state guarantees and through public-private partnerships, arrangements that shift more of the risk onto commercial participants and open the door to private capital.
Where the agenda ultimately settles is at the level of individual companies, which turn sectoral priorities into investment decisions and products. That places private firms, financial institutions and research organizations at the center of the industrial cooperation the ministers' forum is meant to steer.
The workforce is the constraint that grows alongside the rest. The Korea International Cooperation Agency has helped establish four vocational education centers in Uzbekistan, in Tashkent, Fergana, Shakhrisabz and Samarkand. A fifth is under construction in Urgench.
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