Competition in Uzbekistan's E-Commerce Market: Concentration, Strategic Groups and Seller Multi-Homing

Uzbekistan's e-commerce market expanded from six billion soums of turnover in 2016 to 31,551.9 billion soums in 2025, yet it remains dominated by a single platform, formally designated as holding a dominant position by the national competition authority in 2025. Conventional concentration measures therefore portray the market as effectively monopolised. This study argues that such measures capture only the consumer side of what is structurally a two-sided market, and that competitive intensity must also be measured on the seller side. The research combines secondary data on platform characteristics and market structure with an original bilingual survey of 253 marketplace sellers conducted in Uzbekistan between February and April 2026. Concentration is estimated through scenario-based Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) and concentration-ratio calculations, complemented by a seller-presence concentration index derived from survey responses and by a strategic-group mapping of eight active platforms. The turnover-side index ranges from 4,520 to 5,746 across plausible scenarios, roughly twice the conventional high-concentration threshold of 2,500. The seller-side index is lower at approximately 4,796, and platform-presence shares sum to 161 per cent, indicating an average of 1.6 platforms per seller and multi-homing by 51 per cent of respondents. Strategic-group mapping further shows that platforms occupy distinct functional niches rather than competing as close substitutes. The position of the dominant platform therefore rests on consumer-side infrastructure rather than on seller exclusivity, and the principal competitive constraint originates in the low cost to sellers of maintaining a second storefront. Policy attention should accordingly address seller switching costs rather than market share as such.