TASHKENT

British American Tobacco’s joint venture in Uzbekistan (UzBAT) has increased its shares in Samfruit company, one of the largest producers and distributors of dried fruits, vegetables and herbs in the Central Asian nation.

Earlier this month, UzBAT bought another package of shares of Samfruit, increasing it to 35 percent from 32 percent in 2020, local news reports said, citing a purchase deal in the local open data portal.

Uzbek-Swiss joint venture Samfruit, founded in 2002, owns a plant with an area of 10 hectares with its own greenhouses for growing seedlings in the Samarkand district of the Samarkand region, as well as the Samfrut-Organic farm with a total area of 234 hectares in the Nurabad district.

The company said that its main partners for many years had been the largest international manufacturers of food, canned and confectionery products, such as Mars, Nestle, Unilever, Gerber, and others.

British American Tobacco has been operating in Uzbekistan since 1994 and employs more than 1,000 people. Total investments of British American Tobacco into the country’s economy exceeded $400 million.

Uzbekistan has been taking steps to make the Central Asian nation attractive to foreign investors, reforming its once centralised economy after more than two decades of economic isolation.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has made attracting foreign investors one of his top priorities in measures that have included liberalising the country’s foreign exchange market and modernising business practices, cutting down on the Soviet-era bureaucracy that still holds many of the country’s companies back.

In July, the country, in cooperation with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), produced a report providing a comprehensive outline of the major costs involved in investing in the country, such as enterprise registration, labour costs, taxes and tax incentives, licensing, foreign trade procedures, customs payments and preferences, business services, logistics and other relevant business information, down to social services costs.

It includes a general guide to foreign trade, highlighting features such as Uzbekistan’s State Customs Committee’s united automated information system, as well as listing most favoured nation rules and countries which effectively have Free Trade Agreements with Uzbekistan.