Foreign IT firms paid $2.8M in taxes in Q1 2025 — Apple leads

These payments came from 68 foreign enterprises providing digital services. Remarkably, about 94.5% of the total taxes were paid by just ten major IT companies.

Among them, Apple unexpectedly topped the list by paying 10.67 billion UZS in taxes, surpassing Meta, which dropped to second place with 10.51 billion UZS. Together, these two tech giants accounted for half of all declared digital services and tax contributions.

Google followed closely with 8.93 billion UZS. For the first time, OpenAI (1.09 billion UZS) and TikTok—despite being banned in Uzbekistan — (934.8 million UZS) entered the top five.

The remaining positions in the top ten were occupied by Booking.com (542.7 million UZS), Netflix (467.6 million UZS), Zoom (432.6 million UZS), the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) with 427 million UZS, and gaming platform Xsolla (235.6 million UZS).

The volume of services provided by foreign digital companies also rose sharply—by 47%—from 208.6 billion to 306.6 billion UZS during the same period.

Since the beginning of 2025, six foreign companies—Alibaba Cloud, eBay, Bloomberg LP, OpenAI, DigitalOcean, and ivi.ru — have newly registered with Uzbekistan’s tax authorities.

Over the course of 2023, foreign tech giants paid nearly $9 million in taxes to Uzbekistan, with the volume of digital services rendered increasing by 50%, approaching 1 trillion UZS. Notably, TikTok made it into the top ten taxpayers, despite its official ban.

Since 2020, foreign legal entities that provide digital goods or services to Uzbek consumers are recognized as VAT payers for such transactions. To streamline this, the State Tax Committee established a dedicated VAT office allowing foreign IT companies to register and fulfill tax obligations in Uzbekistan.