Asia’s other partners in Central Asia: loans, used cars and uranium

Within nine months, Japan and South Korea have both given Central Asia a leaders’ summit. Japan hosted the five presidents in Tokyo in December 2025, and South Korea did the same in Seoul on 16 September 2026. India has said it will host its own summit in 2027, five years after the first. All three frame the relationship around the same two ideas: critical minerals and connectivity. Set against what has actually been signed, traded and paid, each partner brings something different, and none of it is yet a mineral supply chain. Japan brings concessional finance. Korea brings contractors and a trade that runs mostly one way. India brings demand, above all for uranium, but has lost its main route in.

Japan’s target is a pipeline; its loans are real

At the first Central Asia plus Japan summit on 20 December 2025, Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae launched what Tokyo called the CA+JAD Tokyo Initiative, with three priorities: green growth and resilience, connectivity, and human resource development. Its headline was a target of ¥3 trillion in business projects in the region over five years. The wording matters. It is a target for projects, including private ones, not a sum of Japanese public money, and no breakdown was published.

What Japan signed that week is easier to measure. JICA agreed an ODA loan of ¥21.4bn with Uzbekistan on 17 December for livestock finance and animal-disease laboratories, at 2.3 per cent a year, repayable over 20 years with six years’ grace. Grants for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and a region-wide disaster risk programme with UNDP came alongside it. The loan equals about 0.7 per cent of the five-year target. That is not a criticism of the loan. Long, cheap and predictable credit for unglamorous sectors is what Japan does well, and few other lenders offer it on those terms.

The gap lies in minerals. The summit listed critical minerals under its green priority. But no Japanese minerals contract of scale was announced in Tokyo, and the ¥3 trillion figure will be hard to test until Tokyo publishes what it counts.

Korea’s trade doubled on the back of used cars

Korea’s trade with the five reached $10.04bn in 2025, according to foreign ministry figures published for the summit. The composition tells the story. Korean exports were about $8.67bn and imports from the region about $1.39bn. Kazakhstan supplied $1.36bn of those imports. Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous state, sold Korea goods worth $22m, against $1.79bn of Korean goods it bought. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan together sold Korea well under $5m.

Kyrgyzstan is the anomaly. It was Korea’s second-largest partner in the region, with $3.48bn of Korean exports, more than Kazakhstan. Trade association data show why: Korea exported $3.2bn of vehicles to Kyrgyzstan in 2025, up 105.4 per cent, almost all of them used. Roughly 130,000 used cars went there, against about 200 new ones. The two datasets come from different compilers and should not be subtracted precisely, but vehicles plainly account for the bulk of the flow. Jung Jun-ha, a researcher at the Korea Automotive Technology Institute, has said Kyrgyzstan “functions as a channel for reexports to Russia”.

The point is not that the car trade is illegitimate. It is that the headline growth in Korea–Central Asia trade, the figure that justifies a summit, owes much to demand from outside the region. It says little about minerals, processing or Korean industry putting down roots.

Seoul’s summit deals are large and mostly memorandums

The summit week produced big totals. Kazakhstan put its agreements with Korean partners at about $19bn, of which about $11bn is tied to projects of the state fund Samruk-Kazyna. They include a gas processing plant at Karachaganak with capacity of 5 billion cubic metres a year and lithium drilling at the Bakennoye deposit. Uzbekistan signed an $8bn partnership programme with the Export-Import Bank of Korea that is not yet tied to projects, alongside a portfolio of about $12bn in prospective joint ventures and a critical minerals fund of undisclosed size. Tajikistan signed 17 agreements with a focus on antimony, and Kyrgyzstan 18, including a desk inside its government to handle Korean investors.

Most of this is memorandums and frameworks that need separate approval project by project. That is normal at this stage. What Korea does bring, and Japan largely does not, is firms that build: engineering contractors, cable makers and a state geological survey willing to explore jointly. If the Karachaganak plant and the lithium work reach financial close, Korea will have moved from selling to the region to producing in it. Until then, the minerals partnership is an intention attached to a trade in manufactured goods.

India has the demand but not the door

India’s trade with the five was under $2bn in 2025, and its cumulative investment in the region is put at about $1.5bn. The constraint is geography. The direct overland route runs through Pakistan, so India’s plan rested on Iran’s Chabahar port. The US sanctions exemption covering Indian operations there expired on 26 April 2026. India had invested at least $120m in the Shahid Beheshti terminal and paid a further $120m in February 2026, but this year’s budget carried no allocation for Chabahar for the first time in a decade. The foreign ministry has said it is discussing the issue with Tehran and Washington and that the current conflict is “a complicating factor”. Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri has said India is working with key stakeholders to find a “sustainable way forward”.

Demand is where India does register. In February 2026 Kazatomprom asked its shareholders to approve a long-term contract to deliver natural uranium concentrate to India’s Department of Atomic Energy. The company disclosed only that the deal is worth at least half the book value of its assets. Price, volumes and schedule are confidential at both sides’ request. Press estimates of the contract’s value circulate, but neither party has confirmed one, so the size is best stated as the company stated it. Even so, this is the one Asian relationship in which a Central Asian resource is contracted in volume to a buyer outside China and Russia.

What the region gets, and what to watch

For Central Asian governments the Asian partners are worth courting, but for different reasons than the summit declarations suggest. Japan offers long-dated concessional credit. Korea offers contractors and export-bank finance. India offers a large, state-backed buyer for uranium. None of them yet offers market access for processed minerals, and none controls a route that avoids Russia, China or Iran.

The indicators are specific. For Japan, watch whether Tokyo publishes what counts towards ¥3 trillion, and the pace of new JICA and export-credit signings. For Korea, watch whether the $8bn Uzbek programme becomes named project loans, and whether Karachaganak and Bakennoye reach financial close. Watch also whether Korea’s imports from the region rise beyond Kazakhstan. For India, watch the fate of the Chabahar terminal, the first uranium deliveries and whether the 2027 summit takes place on schedule. A partnership in critical minerals will show up first in import data. So far it has not.

Sources

• Prime Minister’s Office of Japan — The Summit of the “Central Asia plus Japan” Dialogue (CA+JAD) (Summary) (20 December 2025)
• JICA — Signing of Japanese ODA Loan Agreement with Uzbekistan: supporting livestock industry and food security (22 December 2025)
• The Korea Times — Korea welcomes Central Asia’s leaders (16 September 2026)
• Korea JoongAng Daily — Out with the new, in with the old: Korea’s used cars driving up record export numbers (24 February 2026)
• The Times of Central Asia — Central Asia’s first Korea summit produces different deals for each country (18 September 2026)
• ETV Bharat — India’s Central Asia push faces the familiar challenge of connectivity and Chinese influence (September 2026)
• Al Jazeera — Is India’s Chabahar dream in Iran dead? (29 April 2026)
• Kazatomprom — Notice of the Extraordinary General Meeting of Shareholders (20 February 2026)