Export earnings recover, but remain below 2019
Uzbekistan earned $62.3 million from fresh-apricot exports in 2024, up 37.7% from $45.2 million in 2023. Recorded export weight moved in the opposite direction, falling 5.8% to 64,785 tonnes. Higher receipts therefore did not come from shipping a larger recorded quantity.
The longer view is less straightforward than a single strong annual result. Export earnings were $67.3 million in 2019, fell to $49.2 million in 2020, and then dropped sharply to $8.2 million in 2021 and $5.9 million in 2022. They recovered strongly in 2023 and 2024, but the 2024 total was still 7.5% below 2019 in current dollars.
This report covers fresh apricots under HS 080910, known as o‘rik in Uzbek. Dried apricots belong to a separate trade category and are excluded. Keeping the categories separate matters because fresh and dried fruit have different weights, shelf lives and commercial uses.
More earnings from less recorded weight
Recorded export weight fell from 68,805 tonnes in 2023 to 64,785 tonnes in 2024. Dividing export value by net weight gives an average export unit value of $0.96 per kilogram in 2024, compared with $0.66 in 2023, an increase of 46.2%.
Uzbekistan’s Fresh Apricot Exports, 2019–2024. View underlying data →
An export unit value is an aggregate accounting measure. It can change when destination shares, grades, varieties, shipment timing or reporting change. It does not directly measure the price received by farmers or their profits. The figures establish that export earnings rose while recorded weight fell, but they do not show which commercial factors caused the change.
There is also a measurement limitation. UN Comtrade flags the world-total net weights for 2019–2023 as estimated. The 2024 figure is not flagged as estimated. Weight comparisons and calculated unit values across these years need particular care. The very low export quantities in 2021 and 2022 should not be used on their own to infer the size or cause of a harvest shock.
Russia takes a larger share
Russia purchased $48.2 million of Uzbekistan’s fresh-apricot exports in 2024, accounting for 77.3% of their value. Kazakhstan followed with $9.3 million, or 14.9%, and Kyrgyzstan with $2.4 million, or 3.9%. Together, these three partners represented 96.2% of export earnings.
Uzbekistan’s Fresh Apricot Export Destinations, 2024. View underlying data →
Russia’s share increased from 65.8% in 2023, a rise of 11.6 percentage points. Its purchases increased by about $18.4 million, more than the $17.0 million rise in total export earnings. That means the increase in recorded sales to Russia more than offset the net decline across other destinations.
Azerbaijan and Belarus were the next largest destinations, with $1.3 million and $0.7 million respectively. The presence of additional buyers is useful, but their small shares mean that counting destination countries alone would overstate diversification.
These are immediate trading partners. The records do not identify final consumers or subsequent re-exports. This distinction also matters when comparing with 2019, when Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan together accounted for 73.4% of value and Russia accounted for 19.7%. In 2023, unspecified areas represented another 10.0% of export value. Those records are retained in the dataset rather than assigned to a country without evidence.
The current pattern leaves a large share of earnings exposed to demand, border procedures and transport conditions in one recorded market. This describes a concentration risk. It does not establish that a particular policy change or disruption caused the observed trade pattern.
A broad harvest with several major regions
Uzbekistan’s official apricot production series records a harvest of 529,400 tonnes in 2024, up 5.3% from 502,800 tonnes in 2023. It was still 1.3% below the 536,500 tonnes recorded in 2019.
Fergana was the largest producing region in 2024, with 171,300 tonnes, followed by Bukhara with 101,100 tonnes and Andijan with 72,500 tonnes. Together, they accounted for approximately 65.1% of national output. Samarkand produced 34,200 tonnes and Kashkadarya 32,400 tonnes.
Uzbekistan Apricot Production by Region, 2024. View underlying data →
Production and exports measure different things. The harvest series covers all categories of farms and does not identify how much fruit was sold fresh, dried, processed, lost or stored. The trade series measures cross-border shipments of fresh apricots. Subtracting fresh exports from the harvest would therefore not provide a valid estimate of domestic consumption.
National harvest rose between 2023 and 2024 while recorded fresh-export weight fell. That difference is a reason to investigate market allocation and measurement, rather than assume the two series should move together. The data here cannot establish the share of the harvest that was suitable for fresh export or the profitability of alternative uses.
What the recovery does and does not show
The 2024 result is a recovery in export receipts, with an increasingly important Russian market. It is not yet a return to the 2019 value, and it does not by itself establish an improvement in farmer income.
Further research could compare destination-specific unit values, shipment months, quality grades and the costs of getting fruit to market. Evidence on drying and processing would also help explain how the harvest is allocated, but it would require separate data rather than mixing dried-apricot exports into this fresh-fruit series.
For tracking progress, the useful questions are whether export earnings can remain strong across seasons and whether additional markets can account for meaningful shares of sales. These questions are more informative than a single annual growth rate or a count of small destination markets.
Sources and method
Trade figures come from UN Comtrade, using Uzbekistan as reporter (860), exports (X), annual frequency, HS 080910, all immediate partner destinations, partner2 0, customs C00 and transport code 0. Original classifications are H5 for 2019–2022 and H6 for 2023–2024. Values are current US dollars. Weight is net kilograms, divided by 1,000 for tonnes. Unit value is value divided by net kilograms. Percentage changes and destination shares are calculated from the unrounded records.
The annual dataset contains six world-total records. The destination dataset contains 77 individual partner-year records and excludes world totals to prevent double-counting. Destination values and weights reconcile to annual totals within $0.05 and 0.05 kilograms. Unspecified areas are retained. All 2019–2023 world net weights are flagged as estimated. No 2025 records were returned by the preview API when checked, so 2025 is omitted rather than treated as zero.
Production comes from SIAT indicator 1.03.03.0052, Apricot production in all categories of farms. Source figures in thousand tonnes are multiplied by 1,000. The regional dataset has 84 records covering 14 territories in 2019–2024. National totals are excluded from that dataset and used separately for the national figures and shares in this report. Rounded regional figures may not sum exactly to the published national total.
The editorial series date is August 19, 2026. This report and its datasets were prepared, checked and uploaded on October 18, 2026. The cover is an AI-generated illustration. This is descriptive analysis and does not identify causal effects.