Telecom Egypt pulled the plug on its planned sale of a majority stake in its Regional Data Center Hub

Good morning, friends. We have a lot of ground to cover as we kick off the week.

The squeeze on imported cars is the story to watch. A formal tariff is coming by the end of August, but importers of finished cars are already facing an unofficial squeeze.

On regulation: The FRA has introduced mandatory credit checks for individual life ins. policies worth EGP 10 mn or more — and ins’rers now have to build internal systems to flag unusual application patterns. It’s a meaningful tightening of underwriting standards at the high end of the market.

And in energy finance: EAAIF has committed USD 30 mn to Hassan Allam Utilities for the Minya solar and battery storage project, with the EBRD considering up to USD 170 mn more for the same plant. The project itself is notable, but the pattern behind it is the bigger story: development finance lenders are systematically backing Egypt’s grid buildout, and Minya is one node in a much larger architecture.

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The EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum is back — and this year, we’re giving the full day to the one question on every business leader's mind: What does AI actually mean for your company, your people, and your own job?

Leaders in New York, London, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore are asking the same things, and nobody has built a playbook that works yet. We're all figuring it out in real time — and for Egypt, the stakes are unusually high.

Egypt could leapfrog a generation on the back of this technology — or watch AI hollow out the industries and jobs we can't afford to lose. The leaders who get literate early will be the ones who get to decide which road we take.

Every session on stage answers one question: “So, what do I actually do about it?”

Join us on 5 October in Cairo. Seats are limited and attendance is by invitation only.

Request your invitation here.

Data hub stays in-house

Telecom Egypt (TE) wants to keep its data center business in-house: The EGX-listed telco pulled the plug on its planned sale of a majority stake in its Regional Data Center Hub (RDH) to Helios Investment Partners, the UK-based, Africa-focused PE firm, according to a bourse disclosure (pdf). TE cited unmet conditions in the term sheet — including some tied to third parties — but gave no further details.

ICYMI- Helios secured preliminary board approval in September to acquire 75-80% of a subsidiary that would own RDH. The binding offer valued RDH at USD 230-260 mn, depending on performance metrics.

Helios may have lost this sale, but it's still making big moves in Egypt. Its bid for Raya Holding’s frozen-food unit Raya Foods has escalated from an initial USD 40 mn for 49% — a mix of share purchase, capital increase, and a convertible loan, on an estimated USD 65 mn valuation — to a full buyout. The Raya board cleared the offer in December, with terms pending a fair-value review. The bid sits inside a plan the PE firm — which manages around USD 3 bn in assets — announced last year to deploy up to USD 250 mn across Egyptian acquisitions spanning consumer, fintech, and digital assets.

What’s next: TE will fold RDH into a wholly owned subsidiary with a dedicated technical and commercial team, betting on rising local and global demand for data centers, the filing said. The company says the decision will have no financial or operational impact on the parent.

Clearing the way inland

French shipping group CMA CGM has asked the Investment Ministry to let dry ports clear cargo as final customs destinations — the status sea ports hold — and to revisit transit-certificate procedures, steps that would benefit the group’s own dry-port and sea terminal investments, according to a cabinet statement. Egyptian dry ports can already clear cargo — what CMA CGM wants is for a container to finish clearance there without first clearing at the seaport, cutting a step for goods moving inland.

The request aligns with CMA CGM’s whole-chain footprint. Last year, it won competition-authority clearance for a 35% stake in the USD 60 mn October Dry Port project, where it also markets rail connections linking Alexandria and Ain Sokhna with the dry port. Final-clearance status would make October Dry Port a more useful node in that chain. The group is also a partner in Alexandria's Tahya Misr multipurpose terminal and in the Red Sea Container Terminal at Sokhna — which opened this year with initial capacity of 1.7 mn TEUs.

IN CONTEXT- The government has spent the year loosening transit rules to capture Gulf and East Africa cargo rerouted by the Hormuz crisis. It dropped advance ACI registration for Gulf-bound transit cargo moving through Nuweiba, Ain Sokhna, and Safaga in March, before extending the exemption to cargo bound for six East African markets last month. Transit trade is up 40% since March, with the Europe-Egypt-GCC route gaining traction during the war. Customs also moved last week to activate the UN-backed International Road Transport (TIR) system by appointing the Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce as its national guarantor — this would allow trucks to move goods across borders under a single customs document.

Second SPAC preps to shop

The board of OG Capital, the newly-listed blank check company, approved putting a tenfold issued-capital increase — from EGP 10 mn to EGP 100 mn, funded by an EGP 90 mn issuance of 90 mn new shares — to a shareholder vote, according to a disclosure to the EGX (pdf). The SPAC must clear the EGP 100 mn floor within three months of listing before it can hunt a target.

What’s next: Shareholders have to approve the increase first. The 90 mn new shares would then be placed privately with qualified investors and institutions. Under the Financial Regulatory Authority’s (FRA) SPAC rules, the proceeds sit untouched in a local bank — or low-risk liquid securities — until there is an acquisition. The same rules give a SPAC six months from listing to bring a target to a shareholder vote, extendable with the FRA's sign-off. OG Capital listed temporarily on 19 May, which puts that deadline at around 19 November.

IN CONTEXT- The SPAC market is small but growing. OG Capital was preceded by Catalyst Partners Middle East (CPME), which listed in late 2024. A third is in the pipeline: Netherlands-based PE firm RMBV filed with the FRA in May to set up its own vehicle, eyeing targets across consumer goods, industrials, education, and financial services.

REMEMBER- CPME cleared the same threshold and still took over a year to reach the trading floor, debuting at end-2025 only after a run of acquisitions that lifted its issued capital to around EGP 3 bn. The capital raise moves OG Capital forward in the process, but it says nothing about how soon a deal may land.

Fertilizers may catch a break

The government is weighing exemptions for Mopco and Abu Qir Fertilizers from transferring 5% of income from state-owned companies to the treasury, a government source tells EnterpriseAM. The government is building a final database of covered companies that will exclude firms where state ownership is below 50%, in addition to considering temporary carveouts for companies that may need to retain earnings to shore up their balance sheets or fund investment.

Why fertilizers: Mopco and Abu Qir benefited from a war-era export boom as global fertilizer prices climbed, but the cycle has cooled. Egypt's fertilizer exports fell 58.4% y-o-y in April to USD 117.8 mn, per Capmas — leaving companies that may be past peak-cycle income still needing capex and balance-sheet room, which makes retained earnings more sensitive.

PSA-

WEATHER- Cairo is kicking off the week with another hot day — expect to see a high of 37°C and a low of 26°C in the capital throughout the day, according to our favorite weather app.

It’s a little cooler in Alexandria, which is in for a high of 32°C and a low of 24°C.

The big story abroad

It is an oddly quiet morning on the international front pages, with the latest war updates receiving top billing.

The renewed regional war is showing no sign of slowing down. The US military launched fresh attacks yesterday to “swiftly punish” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for a strike on Jordan that killed two US soldiers. Tehran announced yesterday that it would no longer adhere to the terms of the interim truce, and launched a round of strikes on Jordan and Kuwait.

Can manual labor relieve Gen Z’s AI job woes? A wave of young content creators is pitching blue-collar jobs to a Gen Z audience increasingly anxious about an unsteady labor market and AI-driven layoffs. The movement is changing conceptions surrounding jobs — in plumbing, carpentry, and welding — that may be more lucrative and secure than most people think.

The final of the 2026 World Cup kicks off tonight, with defending champion Argentina facing off against Spain. England secured its third-place position yesterday after defeating France 6-4. The final starts at 10pm Cairo time.