Al Ahly Capital is buying out El Sewedy from CIRA’s Damietta university venture

Good morning, lovely people. The long weekend is almost here, but before you log off, we have more coverage from the EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum. If yesterday’s coverage was on the sunny side, what we’re covering today is a more cautionary theme on what could go wrong. The worries shared by our panelists included cyberattacks that move faster than companies can patch, junior staff who no longer learn the job by doing it, and a 400-500 MW data center build-out where only about 20 MW is committed.

“We do a lot of hyping of AI,” eFinance’s Ahmed Sobhy said on stage, and Liquid C2’s cybersecurity veteran Sherif Shaltout admitted he’s “never been more scared.” While nobody on our stage predicted mass layoffs, almost everyone agreed the work itself, and who is ready for it, is changing faster than companies, regulators, or schools can keep up.

Topping our newswell (again): MNT-Halan finally priced its EGX debut. Subscriptions open today at EGP 24.5 per share for 20% of the company — the EGX’s biggest IPO since e-Finance. CIB and London’s Redwheel have already cornerstoned more than a third of the base offering. What we learn in the coming days is whether retail demand matches that institutional vote of confidence.

Banking AI in Egypt is “in its infancy” by design, HSBC Egypt’s CEO said. With the regulatory and legal framework still being defined, the sector is on pause for now, and the bank is testing AI on small projects.

Post for Investment is pulling together a consortium for an equity stake in a data center. Meanwhile, the Electricity Ministry approved EGP 3 bn for new transformer zones at El Alamein and Dabaa. Both are steps forward, but developers face a circular challenge: lenders demand signed customers before financing, customers demand a finished facility before signing, and you can’t build the facility without financing in the first place.

** A QUICK PROGRAMMING NOTE- EnterpriseAM is taking a publication holiday tomorrow in observance of the Sixth of October holiday and will be back in your inboxes at the usual time Sunday morning.

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Changing seats

El Sewedy exits CIRA JV to NBE’s investment arm: Al Ahly Capital — the investment arm of state-owned National Bank of Egypt — is buying El Sewedy Capital Holding’s 40% stake, or 30 mn shares, in CIRA’s Damietta university venture, Al Borsa reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The transaction, which secured approval from the Egyptian Competition Authority earlier this week, will leave CIRA’s 60% stake untouched. It’s expected to close before year-end. The purchase price was not disclosed.

REFRESHER- CIRA and El Sewedy set up the vehicle as a 60-40 JV and secured a 58-feddan plot in New Damietta in 2021 for a university we’d clocked at EGP 2.5 bn. CIRA CEO Mohamed El Kalla said in August the university is due to open in September 2027, one of two on the company’s near-term slate. Al Ahly Capital and CIRA launched Al Ahly CIRA for Educational Services in 2021 with EGP 2 bn in capital and CIRA holding 51%. That vehicle went on to build Saxony Egypt University.

It’s official: we’re off the watchlist

Global index provider FTSE Russell has removed Egypt from its watchlist for a potential demotion to frontier market status, retaining the country as a Secondary Emerging Market, according to a statement. Egypt was placed on the watchlist in September 2025 after the number of Egyptian constituents in the FTSE Emerging Index (Large and Mid Cap) fell to just one, below the minimum of two. The government’s economic reforms and Egyptian Exchange initiatives have since boosted market liquidity, allowing a second Egyptian stock to qualify for the index in the March and September 2026 reviews, FTSE Russell said.

IN CONTEXT- Egypt has already cleared the market cap threshold based on June data, and the securities count that decides the rest is being taken from FTSE’s September semi-annual review of its Global Equity Index Series (GIES), effective from market open on 21 September, according to a July notice.

Why it matters: Removing Egypt from the watchlist should bring “mostly positive sentiment, with no passive outflows expected following the announcement,” EFG Hermes' Ahmed Difrawy told us last month. The sentiment would likely stem from Egypt avoiding the outflows a downgrade could have triggered.

Nobody’s getting fired

Don’t expect AI-driven layoffs at Egypt’s big financial firms through 2027, executives said at the EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum on Monday. HSBC Egypt CEO Todd Wilcox expects headcount to hold steady as jobs move away from routine processing rather than disappearing. Meanwhile, Algebra Ventures’ Omar Khashaba predicted “dislocation rather than disruption,” and CEO of local and regional markets at Beltone Holding Khalil El Bawab actually plans to hire, because digital onboarding is bringing in more clients.

The real pressure is on entry-level roles. AI now does the routine analysis that junior bankers used to learn on, costing firms “core capability” and forcing banks to rethink how they train new joiners, Wilcox and El Bawab both said. Some firms are already changing how they hire: BCG Egypt’s Bassem Fayek said the office replaced one of five case interviews with an AI round where candidates solve problems with an LLM.

The national picture is more worrying than any single firm’s outlook. A study from the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies (ECES) tracking nearly 10k Egyptian job postings found that nearly 75% of workers at high risk of AI displacement cannot transition into alternative careers. The market will keep rewarding generalists and people who “think in terms of systems,” Khashaba said. Dean of AUC’s Onsi Sawiris School of Business Sherif Kamel argued that human capital is the “elephant in the room,” calling for AI to be embedded across education alongside critical thinking rather than taught as a separate subject.

IN CONTEXT- An MIT study found AI more economical than human labor in only 23% of tasks. For Egypt, where labor costs are lower, the break-even point is even farther off, meaning the economic case for mass replacement is not there yet.

The 72-minute heist

AI has made hackers dramatically faster and companies here at home aren’t keeping up, cybersecurity executives told the EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum on Monday. Attackers now get from breaking in to walking out with data in under 72 minutes, down from five hours a year ago, Palo Alto Networks’ Waseem Youssef told the audience, citing the company’s latest Unit 42 report. “The difference now is the economics of the attack,” not their intentions.

The window to patch is shrinking, too. Exploits for newly patched vulnerabilities now arrive in under 23 hours, down from a day and a half, meaning that more attacks hit systems before companies have patched them, Fortinet’s Mohamed ElGarf added. Across the Middle East and Africa, ransomware and other attacks rose 64% between 1Q 2025 and 1Q 2026, according to ZeroFox data.

Attackers have the edge for now, facing no regulatory hoops, Liquid C2’s Sherif Shaltout said on our stage. AI lets them hit high-value targets alongside thousands of other targets simultaneously using agents that work round the clock. Defenders are still fighting over budgets. One of three executives on the morning panel ranked AI as a top-two priority. SMEs, “the bulk of the economy,” are the most exposed. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I don't think I’ve ever been more scared,” Shaltout said.

Your own AI agent is the new insider threat. Companies are building agents that can move funds or access customer data, and an attacker who takes control of one gets everything it can touch, Youssef says. “I’m not really worried about an AI model that will hallucinate, I’m really worried about what [an agent] can do when it hallucinates.”

Egypt hasn’t been hit hard yet, but it’s on the radar. ElGarf says Egypt has seen “one or two” attacks on healthcare, and “[we’re] seeing so many of the authorities like the Central Bank [among others] put regulations on all the banks related to cybersecurity defenses.” Qalaa Holding’s Chairman and Founder Ahmed Heikal told an earlier panel that three oil and gas companies recently paid “huge sums of money” to unlock their data after cyberattacks.

The fix starts with the basics. Shaltout’s list: least-privilege access, segmentation, and a new KPI, mean time to fix vulnerabilities, because a 15-minute response is now too slow. Youssef’s rule for automating defense: if the action is high-confidence, reversible, and limited in impact, let the machine do it. Otherwise, a human signs off.

Happening this week

President Abdel Fattah El Sisi arrived in Seoul yesterday for a state visit, according to an Ittihadiya statement, marking his first visit to South Korea since 2016. He holds a summit with President Lee Jae-myung on Thursday covering trade, investment, infrastructure, and supply chains, and will join a roundtable with heads of major Korean companies. The South Korea leg is the opening stop of an Asian tour that also includes Malaysia and Indonesia.

PSA-

WEATHER- Cairo is a touch warmer today, with a high of 30°C and a low of 19°C — edging back up from yesterday, according to our favorite weather app.

It’s similar on the coast in Alexandria, with a high of 28°C and a low of 19°C.

And over the weekend, expect to see steady weather in the capital (a high of 30°C) and around 26°C for our friends on the Mediterranean.

The big story abroad

AI and rocket player SpaceX is in the market for USD 40 bn in financing to snap up Nvidia chips, Financial Times reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. The fundraising effort, which Apollo Global Management is expected to lead, seeks about USD 10 bn in bank loans and USD 30 bn in investment-grade debt, and is expected to close next year. Bond group Pimco was among a small number of lenders in talks to fund the blockbuster chip purchase.

An AI-led tech rally has rocketed the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite to new closing records yesterday, despite the Fed's first rate hike in three years and a months-long war that has pushed oil to USD 100 a barrel. A handful of tech giants are doing the heavy lifting, with Nvidia hitting a new all-time high after gaining 4.5% over the past week and Meta climbing 24% since mid-August, while most other stocks are falling.

More than 250k people rallied across France yesterday to back high school students demanding more education funding, according to government figures. Police used tear gas and detained nearly 500 people, and some student groups have called for new protests tomorrow.

*** It’s Hardhat day — your weekly briefing of all things infrastructure in Egypt: EnterpriseAM’s industry vertical focuses each Wednesday on infrastructure, covering everything from energy, water, transportation, and urban development, as well as social infrastructure such as health and education.

In today’s issue: We look into how Egypt can dig its way out of the mining industry’s “valley of death,” following last week’s mining forum