MNT-Halan is offering 20% of its Egyptian arm, a move that may bring foreign investors back to the EGX

Foreigners have spent the year selling Egyptian stocks, and MNT-Halan’s IPO is shaping up as one of the best chances in years to bring them back. MNT Tech Holding for Financial Investments, the Egyptian arm of fintech group MNT-Halan, said on Thursday it will list on the Egyptian Exchange, according to an intention-to-float (ITF) notice seen by EnterpriseAM. We previously reported high interest across in-person and virtual roadshows in the UK, the GCC, the US, and beyond. MNT’s bankers were pitching investors on a valuation of up to USD 1 bn for the Egypt arm alone when they began testing the waters in June.

ICYMI- MNT-Halan’s Egyptian arm formally kicked off its IPO on Thursday. The parent company is putting 320 mn shares, good for 20% of the company, up for sale in a fully secondary offering split between institutional and retail investors. Pricing will come through the book-building process, with the IPO expected to wrap in October pending regulatory approvals. The parent is also putting up to EGP 4 bn into the business through a closed capital increase at the offer price, while another 24.3 mn shares will be sold to senior management before trading starts. Citi and EFG Hermes are joint global coordinators and bookrunners.

Why it matters: MNT is the first in a line of big offerings that includes the highly anticipated IPOs of Banque du Caire and Misr Life. Strong international demand could keep foreign investors in the market long enough to look at what comes next.

How it makes money

MNT makes money well beyond the interest spread, according to the notice. It originates loans, earns interest on financing, and separately books securitization, offloading, and sukuk profits on loans moved off the balance sheet. That’s why its gross loan book includes both what it still holds and what it has already offloaded. Then come the fees, with things like loan issuance, merchant rebates tied to consumer finance, card float, POS transactions, cashouts and transfers, bill payments, brokerage, and fund subscriptions through Halan’s partnership with Azimut Egypt.

Cross-selling is where the real growth is: Just over half of MNT’s customers were using more than one Halan service as of end-June, and those customers were worth around 64% more over their lifetime than those sticking to a single service. Its 1.2k distribution points across 25 governorates, from branches to merchant and mall outlets, bring customers in, and about 61% of those who joined through a branch have since moved on to the app.

How the EGX is pricing its peers

The EGX has two listed comparables to MNT, but neither is quite apples to apples. Fawry has been on the EGX since 2019 and was the first Egyptian tech company to hit a USD 1 bn market cap, but it’s largely a payments business, meaning it is asset-light, makes its money primarily on transaction fees, and carries little credit risk on its balance sheet. Valu, on the other hand, lends to consumers, has a loan book that needs funding, and ultimately lives or dies on borrowers paying it back, which gives us a better benchmark. MNT’s business model is much closer to Valu’s than to Fawry’s, though it serves lower-income customers with thinner credit histories, and much of its lending is at the nano and micro end of the market.

Valu’s net income grew 43% y-o-y to EGP 486 mn in 1H 2026. It listed at some 37x trailing earnings and closed the third quarter at 28.5x, by our math and EGX data, respectively.

So where should MNT price against that? Amr El Alfi, chief equity strategist at Thndr, tells EnterpriseAM whether MNT’s stock deserves a discount or a premium to Valu is harder to call. A lot depends on demand when the book opens and how the independent financial advisor values the company. Tycoon capital markets expert Sameh Gharib would cast the net a little wider. Beyond Valu, he points to Fawry and e-Finance on the fintech side, Contact in consumer finance, Beltone, GB Corp and Raya through their exposure to consumer finance businesses. If MNT prices above those names and the book still fills, that means its listed peers are undervalued, and they are likely to reprice too, Gharib tells us. He sees much less risk of it working the other way, with a weaker MNT valuation pulling peers down.

Sizing up the companies: For investors, particularly foreign funds, who like the prospects of consumer finance in a country of some 109 mn people, many of them young and underbanked, Valu and MNT are the blue-chip names. Investors placing orders for MNT shares will do so amid heightened scrutiny of Egypt’s fast-growing consumer finance industry, where the concern has been whether rapid lending is pushing borrowers past their capacity to repay. MNT has roughly twice Valu’s active customer base, at some 1.9 mn against 955k, reaches further down the income scale, and is about to be marked by public investors for the first time. Default rates run below 1.5% on microfinance and between 3.5% and 4% on consumer finance, founder and CEO Mounir Nakhla told Al Ahram in February.

The market it’s landing in

The EGX30 is up 26.8% YTD as of Thursday’s close, and both of this year’s IPOs drew heavy demand. Premium grocer Gourmet priced at EGP 6.90, the top of its range, in February, after a bookbuild that ran 12.2x oversubscribed on the institutional tranche and 55.8x on the retail. It closed its first session at the 40% regulatory limit. Energy solutions provider Korra Energi followed in May, opening its book at EGP 2.97 a share for 11% of the company, with the institutional tranche 3.02x covered (revised down from 5.7x), and the retail bloc 31.35x.

But the buying across the market has mostly been local: Local investors accounted for some 90.5% of the value traded in listed stocks over 3Q, with foreigners at 6.1% and regional investors at 3.5%, according to the EGX’s latest quarterly report (pdf). Foreigners were net sellers of some EGP 2.09 bn over the quarter, while regional investors were net buyers of EGP 567.3 mn. Foreigners’ share of trading on EGX has narrowed each quarter as the index has run: 10.3% of turnover in 1Q, 7.7% in 2Q, 6.1% in 3Q.

There’s a cost to an IPO this size:. “Large offerings pull a chunk of market liquidity,” Gharib tells us, enough to slow a rally for a while, and the selling starts before the IPO does. “Once people know the subscription date, they start liquidating part of their portfolio.” Gharib also points out that EFG Hermes is itself listed: “The offering’s manager is Hermes, and Hermes is a listed company,” giving investors another place to react to the coverage ratio and how MNT trades once it hits the market.

Pundits aren’t counting on foreign money to rush back in: A strong IPO won’t necessarily bring international investors back immediately, El Alfi says — “it also depends on whether the IPO is marketed to international institutions in the first place.” Given the size of the deal, he expects institutions to take most of the stock. The timing also helps. “I think it’s all about liquidity rather than market performance,” he says, with trading liquidity picking up over the past few months, making it easier for the market to absorb a new offering.

OUR TAKE- While a first-day pop would tell us plenty about retail appetite, which nobody really doubts will be there, what matters most is who fills the institutional book, and particularly how much goes to foreign investors rather than local funds or regional money. A meaningful foreign allocation gives the next wave of issuers a stronger benchmark to price against and makes the privatization pipeline that much easier to bring to market. Without it, we’ve had a very good local IPO, but we’re no closer to answering the foreign-capital question.

BACKGROUND- The ITF follows MNT’s temporary listing of 1.6 bn shares on the EGX’s main board in mid-September, a step that handed it the HALN.CA ticker and started a six-month clock, but no trading. The listing committee gave the company until mid-March to complete the transaction.

WATCH THIS SPACE- Nakhla will be on stage at the EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum tomorrow to talk about the listing.