El Araby to partner with Sharp on fridge and freezer manufacturing: El Araby Group and Japan’s Sharp will set up a USD 50 mn factory for the manufacture of refrigerators and deep freezers, under a newly-inked partnership agreement, according to a cabinet statement.

The two sides will set up a joint venture — dubbed Horizon for Home Appliances Manufacturing Co. — that aims to sell some 500k refrigerators locally in 2027, Sharp said in a statement. Sharp will own 20% of the venture and El Araby will own the remaining 80%.

The details: The companies will break ground on the factory in 1Q 2025, while manufacturing is expected to begin in 1Q 2026. The factory will have a production capacity of 400k units a year, during its first year of operations, and provide some 1.5k jobs. The factory will be set up in the Quweisna zone, previously known as the Mubarak Industrial Zone — where the two sides alongside a number of other partners are setting up a USD 500 mn industrial complex.

All part of the plan: The new factory adds to a string of investments in factories and production lines by El Araby, including a USD 40 mn air conditioning compressor factory in partnership with Taiwan’s Rechi and a bid to locally manufacture CPE-VDSL routers. “The strategy of the El Araby Group in the current period is to localize global technology and export it to countries worldwide in order to make Egypt a global center of manufacturing household and electronic appliances,” chairman Ibrahim El Araby said.

Decades of partnerships: Sharp first partnered up with El Araby in 2004, “when the two companies began jointly working on air conditioner technologies, manufacturing, and sales.”

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