Everywhere you go in Uzbekistan, you’ll repeatedly see one type of car, over and over again. Chevrolet. But not the Trucks, SUV’s, and Sportscars you’re used to seeing, but instead models you’ve never even heard of. But how did Chevy end up as the dominant brand on the other side of the world and what does that tell us about who captures the value when a developing country industrialises on someone else’s technology? Well, I went to Uzbekistan and asked my friend Bany, “Why are there so many Chevrolets here in Uzbekistan?” and she said “So if you look closely [at] my city, like [at] the whole country, 9/10 cars [have] the Chevrolet logo”.

In 1991, during the fall of the soviet union, a mere 2% of Uzbek households owned a car, as a result of strict soviet policy. Today, over 60% do. The logical thought would be that the market opened up and cheap imports flooded in, but actually, the opposite was true. “And the main reason is, people don’t want to pay huge taxes for bringing foreign cars here”. During the USSRs rule, Uzbekistan was a raw materials generator, specialising in cotton. After the collapse, the government, led by Islam Karimov, recognised the need to upskill the country and saw a massive opportunity in the automotive sector. It was a perfect mix of a large potential market and an opportunity to upskill the population. But how did the country go from making 92,000 cars a year in 2016, to 5x that at 457,000 in 2025?

Let's look at that bit about huge taxes Bany mentioned. For decades, Uzbekistan implemented high customs duties to protect its monopoly car market, and clearance payments could reach 150% of a car's cost. The idea of bringing in anything that wasn't local was totally unreasonable.

But, to get there, Uzbekistan had to first build an automotive industry.

South Korea had been in the automotive industry for a long time, and eyed up Uzbekistan as a gateway into the post soviet market. Uzbekistan didn’t really know how to build cars, so their need for technology and South Korea's market share interest in the post soviet economy was a great trade that benefited both countries. Things went okay, until Daewoo, the South Korean company involved, collapsed. General Motors (GM) acquired them, and entered around 2007 to support modernisation efforts and Uzbekistan's efforts to enter markets such as Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. GM insisted on the Chevrolet branding. Why? Who knows, they just wanted the Chevy brand to push into the post soviet market.

But what does this tell us about industrialisation in developing economies? Uzbekistan, relative to a lot of industrialised western economies, was low skill but highly specialised. In their case, cotton was their speciality, but it was the market potential that Daewoo wanted. This graph shows Uzbekistan's agriculture as a share of GDP vs. GDP per capita, or in other words, how much agricultural production contributed to the economy. 

Often, developing countries lack the technology to produce like a developed country and therefore rely on the research and innovation from first world countries. The big issue is that developing economies often don't have equal things to trade such as specialty in a specific market that isn't already well understood by developed countries. South Korea has no interest in cotton production beyond what it already makes and imports, so the only trade Uzbekistan could make were raw materials and the promise of lucrative future returns. This is often one of the critiques of globalisation. Those that are able to get ahead and stay ahead have a lot more leverage on those that sit behind. Even though Daewoo was the first in the market, they lacked the financial structure to see the returns play out in the long run.

There is a clear power imbalance, and this ultimately reads as exploitation. But is this necessarily a bad thing? Without South Korea's aid, Uzbekistan would have never launched a successful automotive industry and may very well have stayed stuck for a lot longer in their specialisations. As a result of their modernisation efforts, they are now amongst the highest in central Asia for things like life expectancy and poverty (fact check this).

Trade has meant that countries who lack research, innovation, capital, or any other valuable resource, have the ability to trade something good for something somebody else has. In many cases though, poorer countries lack stable governments and are often rife with corruption. Setting up strong governing bodies can help prevent the loss fed out to the powerful few in the country. But alas, the chicken and the egg. One would argue that a strong and stable government can only come from having the resources available to fund and maintain such an operation. Playing catch up to the rest of the world has never been harder. As resources become scarce and geopolitics dominates the bandwidth of rich countries, there is more room and drive for exploitation at the cost of the poor and helpless.

Uzbekistan is a great example of a country that chose long term growth and prosperity to benefit its people in the long run. In a mere 30 year window, Uzbekistan managed to prop up household vehicle ownership from 2% to a baffling 60%, and subsequently, double their GDP per capita in the same span of time.

“So just look over there. This is the most Uzbek car you can ever see”. The Chevy Cobalt. Perhaps it really is a symbol of Uzbekistan. In 2025, the country produced ~458,000 cars, of which, 35% were Cobalts. Of the 43,000 Uzbek made Chevrolets exported that year, 37,000 were Cobalts alone. What began as an ambition to bring foreign technology into a relatively unskilled manufacturing economy, has become the biggest automotive industry in Central Asia, capable of producing hundreds of thousands of vehicles every year, and selling them to neighbouring markets, particularly Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan. But the distinction between manufacturing a product and capturing the value that goes into making it is relevant. How much of the engineering, intellectual property, technology, and component manufacturing, actually belongs to Uzbekistan, rather than the foreign companies whose designs and supply chains underpin its factories?

That distinction is becoming increasingly important as China enters the picture. In 2024, Uzbekistan imported around 75,000 cars worth $1.28 billion, with more than 80% of them coming from China. Then, by 2025, electric vehicles alone accounted for 57,000 of the 80,000 passenger cars imported. China has developed a formidable competitive advantage in electric vehicle manufacturing, built on economies of scale and strong integrated supply chains. In 2025, China accounted for around 3/4 of global electric car production and more than 80% of battery cell manufacturing. Competing with China's huge scale on price alone is a shaky strategy for Uzbekistan, considering it has already removed many barriers domestically for imports. Perhaps its opportunities lie elsewhere. Could moving beyond assembly towards engineering, component manufacturing, battery technology and the development of domestic suppliers capable of serving both local factories and regional export markets be its future? Uzbekistan has already demonstrated that it can move from a raw materials based economy towards modern industrial manufacturing. But can it make the next leap, from assembling foreign technology, to developing and owning more of the technology itself? Or, will the country that once traded cotton for cars, now find itself having to trade cars for something else?