The Central Bank began to partially classify data on trading on the foreign exchange market. Before, in the monthly statistical bulletin, the table on the volume of foreign currency trading on the foreign exchange trades included separate data on the purchase and sale of currency by commercial banks. In the 2023 bulletin, this section is summarized and was changed to “foreign exchange trading turnover in commercial banks.”
Over the 11 months of 2023, banks bought 17.02 billion USD worth of foreign currency (+20% compared to the same period in 2022) and sold for 5.6 billion USD (-12.5%), that is, over the year the difference between purchases and sales increased 7 .79 billion to $11.42 billion (+46.6%). That is, banks are buying more and more currency for their clients and selling less on the exchange.
In the January-November bulletin you can see how the sharp depreciation of the soum against the dollar affected currency trading. When Uzbek soum devalued by 4.5% in three weeks in March 2022, the sales volume almost doubled, which is why in April banks sold more currency than they bought (there has not been such a positive difference over the past few years).
Whereas the exchange rate adjustment in August 2023, when the national currency dipped by 408 soums (-3.5%) in a single day, did not result in an increase in supply on the currency exchange. In September, sales volumes continued to decline, and only by October did banks begin to increase supply.
According to the latest 2023 bulletin, December saw the highest currency trading volume in the last four years (data available from early 2020) at $2.66 billion, up 9.7% from December 2022 trade.
While, the Central Bank is delaying the publication of gold and foreign exchange reserves by 20 days. The IMF's Enhanced General Data Dissemination System calendar releases this monthly report on the 7th of each month.
As reported earlier, Uzbekistan’s international reserves at the end of 2023 decreased by $1.2 billion to $34.56 billion, which happened for the first time since 2018. The physical volume of gold decreased by almost 25 tons over the year, and foreign currency reserves decreased by $2.27 billion to $9.37 billion.
