Egypt

With the government prioritising economic diversifi¬cation, Egypt’s digital transformation continued apace in 2018. Although the country’s mobile market appears to have already reached saturation in terms of subscribers, exponential increases in data use on the back of the 4G rollout, as well as the prospect of a sizeable fixed-line network expansion, are expected to continue to drive revenue...

With a long-established presence of large-scale manufacturing capacity and a rapidly expanding domestic market, Egypt’s industrial sector will remain critical for job creation and regional development. Government strategies to expand production capacity into Upper Egypt are expected to improve employment options, and investment into road and railway links will also be critical to ensure that...

Aside from the member states of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Coun¬tries, Egypt is Africa’s largest oil producer, as well as its third-largest producer of dry natural gas, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Despite the abundance of its natural resources, how¬ever, the country faced an energy crisis following the 2011 revolution, marked by frequent blackouts...

With the largest population in the Middle East and a relatively established insurance sector, Egypt has long been a promising market for insurers. Domestically licensed companies have shown strong growth in recent years, driven by public expenditure on capital projects and increasing private sector activity. However, the sector’s impact on the lives of ordinary Egyptians has been limited, with...

The year of 2018 was challenging across the board for many emerging markets, and changing trends in global capital movements have brought turbulence to the Egyptian Exchange as well. After rising significantly in the first four months of 2018, the exchange’s main index, the EGX30, showed a sustained retrenchment to end the year at a level not seen since early 2017. Throughout this period,...

Egypt has been a regional banking powerhouse for more than a century and is home to the biggest bank¬ing sector in North Africa. The industry is also one of the region’s most stable, surviving both the economic turbulence that followed the Arab Spring and a more recent foreign currency crisis that saw government auctions of US dollars and the growth of a parallel market for foreign currency....