Coffee with Jon Rokk on Valmore’s hard-currency turn

Valmore Holding (FKA Egypt Kuwait Holding) is selling mature Egyptian assets to buy foreign-currency (FCY) earnings, as part of the same capital recycling program that saw it exit Delta Ins. to Morocco’s Wafa Assurance in November 2025. The EGX- and Boursa Kuwait-listed investment holding company, which rebranded last year, closed 1H 2026 with hard-currency revenues at 57% of its top line, according to its latest earnings (pdf). The company says it used the Delta sale proceeds to capitalize and invest in a UK project, while its Saudi gas distribution arm is bidding for licenses in five more industrial cities.

Earnings breakdown: Group net income fell 13.7% y-o-y to USD 87.5 mn against a prior-year base carrying USD 44.8 mn of one-off disposal gains, while revenues rose 12.8% to around USD 392 mn and gross income grew 18.1% to USD 143.1 mn. Stripping non-recurring items out of both periods, net income attributable to shareholders rose 46.7%, the company says, with attributable net income from its five largest subsidiaries — AlexFert, Sprea Misr, NatEnergy, Kahraba, and ONS — up 36.9% y-o-y.

Jon Rokk (LinkedIn) has led the group since February 2024, taking over from Sherif El Zayat a month before the EGP devaluation. He told EnterpriseAM a year ago that part of the reason he was brought in was to look beyond the domestic market and de-risk the group’s structural exposure to the EGP. He joined Valmore from Bilfinger, where he led the German industrial services group’s MENA engineering and maintenance business out of Dubai.

We sat down with Rokk to talk about what’s actually driving the numbers, why the capital is leaving for GBP and SAR while the Egyptian portfolio stays put, whether three clean months of gas supply change how he would underwrite a new plant here, and what he would need to see before listing a subsidiary.

Edited excerpts from our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: Reported income came down this half. What was actually driving the underlying numbers?

Jon Rokk: Two companies, mostly. AlexFert operated extremely efficiently and delivered above 100% of the plant’s nameplate capacity, which it could do because we had no gas cuts. When you marry that to where urea prices went, the company benefited, but the important message is it was ready to benefit. Sprea Misr saw turnover decline. Last year, it took reduced margins to gain market share — this year the plan was to win those margins back, and then the Iran conflict hit its supply chain and its export routes. Turnover came down, which we expected, but gross and net income were excellent on a comparable basis.

That’s the strategic shift of the last 18 months showing up. The point isn’t that we have told these businesses what to do from the center. It’s that each of them is agile enough to handle whatever arrives in their sector, whether that’s an opening or a problem.

EnterpriseAM: Hard-currency revenues are at 57% of the group top line. Where do you want that number, and how do you get there?

JR: Higher. But I’m not getting there by shrinking Egypt — that’s the part people sometimes miss. It means either finding more exports out of the Egyptian businesses or growing internationally, and we have done both. We need the USD anyway. We pay dividends in USD, we need them for overseas investment, we need them for CapEx that serves the Egyptian businesses, and some of our feedstock and supply chains price in USD. So this isn’t a statement about Egypt. It’s arithmetic about our own obligations.

Where Egypt is genuinely competitive is manufacturing cost. There’s a good talent pool and a low cost base for fabrication, installation, and manufacturing. The trick is finding businesses that are export-focused. AlexFert and ONS are examples of Egypt-based businesses that generate foreign currency for the group. Our investment team is looking for more of those, and there is a lot of potential.

EnterpriseAM: You’re earning here and deploying in KSA and the UK. Is that confidence in those markets or a hedge against this one?

JR: It’s a bit of both. It’s about having confidence in the market and the product. But we also need to protect against future devaluations. You will know better than I what devaluation has done to this economy over the last ten years. I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t feel I needed to protect my investors from that. So we stick with and grow in Egypt, but we also look to move some capital outside into the right projects that will deliver better shareholder value.

EnterpriseAM: Delta is the clearest example of this strategy. Walk us through the logic.

JR: We owned Delta for a long time, and it was good to us: profitable, successful, a brand we had built into something attractive, which is why we were able to sell it to a serious global player. But the sector is at a crossroads. Ins. in Egypt needs digitizing and modernizing — if you compare how products are sold here, commercial and retail, against the rest of MENA, we are not matching that footprint. We would have had to invest heavily to fix that, and we were prepared to. It was obvious to me that the better decision was to realize the value we had built and put that capital where it would work harder.

So we sold, and the proceeds were used directly to capitalize and invest in the UK project. Once that reaches its first two phases, it will deliver significantly higher net income and cashflow than Delta did. That’s the model, and it’s the bit that gets missed. It isn’t just exiting a mature asset to fund a greenfield one. It’s recognizing that the returns on the other side are going to be materially better. We have also de-risked the EGP element, because those will be GBP earnings.

EnterpriseAM: AlexFert ran at full utilization all quarter because the gas held out. How reliable is that becoming?

JR: It’s the first time in three years. Two years ago there were a lot of cuts, last summer there were fewer, this summer there have been none. I’m a lot more confident we won’t see another break unless something seismic happens.

EnterpriseAM: Would you build a new gas-intensive plant in Egypt today?

JR: I wouldn’t discount it, and I’m not confirming it either. Our philosophy on new investments, new sectors, and new markets is that we study them carefully, do all the due diligence, and communicate when we have something we think will work for the market and for investors.

Let me answer it in a different way. Any gas-intensive project, wherever it is, has to clear the same tests. Is there a market? Can you guarantee the source of supply? Is there price certainty or stability? Is it a hard-currency earner? Those are the KPIs, whether it’s Egypt or anywhere else.

EnterpriseAM: EKACOM prequalified in February for five Saudi industrial cities, and bids were due in April. Where did that land?

JR: We have followed the tender process. There have been some delays driven by the geopolitical situation, and we will comment once it’s finished. But the strategy hasn’t changed. We want to grow gas distribution across the Kingdom, and it fits what they are doing on clean energy and the route to net zero.

Dammam Third Industrial Zone was never the ambition on its own. It was the gateway. We know there are at least 20 or 30 more industrial cities at that scale that we could tap into over the next five to 10 years. We've put SAR 60 mn into CapEx and construction and we’re still ramping up.

EnterpriseAM: What has to be true about a company or a project before you will sign?

JR: A few things. I’m looking to trade in stable environments, and I’m looking at FCY to de-risk the EGP and meet our own USD demands. I have to believe we can add value and unlock growth. We are less likely to be interested in a very stable, well-performing platform, because I would find it difficult to unlock much for my shareholders.

Sector-wise, we know our strengths, but I’m also trying to bring balance. Gas was the theme of this business when I took it over: drilling for it, distributing it, using it as feedstock, burning it for power. That’s great, but I don’t want to be entirely dependent on one element. We have expanded into adjacent spaces, including non-banking financial services and ins., alongside the industrial portfolio, so it’s not as if we are suddenly launching into the unknown by diversifying. Then it’s the returns, asking whether it meets our internal rate of return, and whether it generates cashflow.

The NBFI business is a good example of the balance actually working. We launched it from scratch, it hasn’t been a heavy drain on CapEx, and it grew well in the first few years. The sector had a hard year in Egypt — interest rates, the conflict — but the market is there, and you can see it in what competitors are being valued at. We added consumer finance to microfinance this year because Egypt is different from some of the other territories we operate in, and there’s clearly a place for non-banking services here.

EnterpriseAM: Three years out, what does success look like, and would that include listing one of the subsidiaries?

JR: I wouldn’t say no to a listing. We’re constantly evaluating what’s best for each subsidiary, and if at a particular point an IPO is the best way to unlock value, we’d absolutely consider it.

On the pipeline more broadly, I can’t give you specifics. What I would say is that two years ago we weren’t explaining our model to the market and we weren’t demonstrating it. Now we can. We have divested, unlocked capital, and put it into new investments. The board signed off on a new five-year plan at the end of last year, and the team is responding to it. A good M&A team has plenty in the pipeline, because you won’t conclude everything you look at.

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