The asset is real and large. The Tajik Metallurgical Plant, in the Bobojon-Gafurov district of Sughd, sits on the Shohkadam deposit, where exploration by the Australian firm WOOD put confirmed iron-ore reserves at 59 million tonnes. Phase one, iron-ore concentrate and pellets, began in April 2025 and is due in September 2027. Phase two, due in 2029, adds hot-briquetted iron at 90% iron content, plus blooms and rebar. At capacity the plant is meant to make 850,000 tonnes of briquetted iron and 300,000 tonnes of blooms and rebar a year.
Follow the names on the build, and the picture sharpens. The investor and developer is the Tajik Metallurgical Plant itself. The general contractor is the Chinese firm NETC, which is also building the plant’s 90 MW power centre. A second Chinese company, Lisen, is among the main contractors. The technology for the 90%-iron briquettes comes from India’s Electrotherm. Austria’s SPS is the quality-control and technical-supervision consultant. The Tajik side holds the licence, the site and the presidential sponsorship; the build, the process technology and the power engineering are contracted out.
The pitch is import substitution, and Rahmon gave it a number: Tajikistan imported $600 million of rebar in 2025, and now, he said, it can make its own. On paper that is a sound reason to build. The Central Asia Wire caution is the one it applies to every signed page. A plant that pours its first rebar in 2029 does nothing about a 2025 import bill for years, and the case rests on delivery, not on the ceremony at the fence.
Import substitution that is built, powered and engineered on contract can trade one dependency for another.
Two of the plant’s own inputs are claims on things Tajikistan is short of. The 90 MW captive power centre is a demand on a grid the country already struggles to keep full through winter. The 17.5 km water pipeline and four pumping stations feed a heavy-industry site in a year when the country’s own water-use debts reached 402.9 million somoni. A metals plant of this size is a resource decision as much as an industrial one.
The value-chain logic is where the dependency question lives. Moving from digging ore to making steel is meant to capture value at home. If the construction, the core process technology and the power build all sit with foreign contractors, the project swaps an import bill for a construction-and-technology dependency, much of it Chinese. Who holds the offtake, and on what financing terms, is the number not yet on the table.