Italian Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Edmondo Cirielli today opens the Italy-Uzbekistan Business Forum, an event organised by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Italian Trade Agency – ICE and Confindustria.
Besides Deputy Minister Cirielli’s speech, the institutional session opening the event will feature speeches by the Minister of Investment, Industry and Trade of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Laziz Kudratov, the Ambassador of Italy to Uzbekistan, Agostino Pinna, and the Ambassador of Uzbekistan to Italy, Otabek Akbarov.
This will be followed by presentations on the opportunities for commercial interchange, industrial partnership and investment between the two countries, with a focus on the energy, infrastructure and transport, industrial technology and agro-industry sectors. At the end of the plenary session, B2B meetings between Italian and Uzbek companies are scheduled. The event will in fact be attended by about 200 Italian and 60 Uzbek companies.
The initiative aims to further strengthen Italy’s economic relations with Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s most populated country, with a GDP that has been growing steadily since 1996. In 2022, Italy was the country’s 2nd largest European trading partner.