Maersk tells the SCA it hopes to have all its services back on the Suez Canal by March 2027

Good morning, friends. All that glitters isn’t gold on the consumer finance front. The FRA decided bullion and jewelry count as investments, not consumer goods, so they can’t be financed on installments. But it raises a question we discussed with analysts in our top story: if people are borrowing to hedge inflation, is that a savings gap or a confidence problem? The sources we spoke to lean toward the first, and the numbers agree with them — household deposits were up 15% in the year to May, with the overnight rate still five points above inflation.

Also in today’s issue: Egypt’s greenhouses grow 3-4x what open fields produce per square meter but still only a fraction of what Dutch growers manage. We talked to growers about cheap local controllers built for desert heat instead of Nordic cold and state greenhouses going out on lease in part two of our agritech series. We also have all the details on a substrate plant planned for the SCZone that should help us stop importing soil.

ALSO- Short selling cleared another hurdle with an FRA model contract this week. The regulation is covered, but we’re waiting on MCDR’s live link to go up and to see whether asset owners are actually willing to lend their shares. The link is what killed the 2019 attempt — will new incentives pave the way for success?

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Canal comeback

Maersk hopes to have all of its shipping services back on the Suez Canal route by March 2027. Maersk COO Rabab Boulos gave that timeline to Suez Canal Authority (SCA) Chairman Osama Rabie during a video call on Tuesday, telling him the canal “remains the optimal choice” for the group, according to the authority’s account of the meeting.

Hapag-Lloyd, Maersk’s partner in the Gemini alliance, is working to a similar clock. CEO Rolf Habben Jansen expects “more or less all of our services [to] be back through Suez, maybe with one or two exceptions” sometime in 1Q 2027, “if there is no change.” That puts Gemini well ahead of the wider market, which is only about 30-35% back to normal on Suez routing, liner analyst Lars Jensen estimates.

Maersk’s traffic through the canal is already rising: Maersk-affiliated vessels made 276 transits in January-September 2026, up from 146 a year earlier, and their net tonnage more than tripled to 23.3 mn tons from 7 mn, according to SCA figures. That growth comes off a low base: canal-wide transits fell to 12.8k in 2025, the weakest year since the diversions began, down from 13.2k in 2024 and 26.4k in 2023, according to the SCA’s annual statistics (pdf).

And Egyptian ports are picking up calls: In its latest network changes, Maersk said its AE11 service would call at Port Said westbound instead of Tangier and AE19 would add Damietta, with first sailings on the new rotations leaving Asia between 15 and 22 November. The changes follow Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd’s September decision to move four more joint services back through the canal.

Red Sea stability will decide the rest: AE12, the last of those four services, now has a Suez rotation on paper, with two Port Said East calls on its run to Slovenia’s Koper and Croatia’s Rijeka. Maersk hasn’t set a date for its first transit, and the first change it has dated is a call at Sri Lanka’s Colombo in January. Further changes to the network still depend on “the ongoing stability in the Red Sea area” and “the absence of any escalation in conflicts in the region,” Maersk says.

Prescription for Algeria

Egypt is in talks with Algeria to make it easier for our local drugmakers to sell there, a senior government official tells EnterpriseAM. The goal is to take more than 10% of the market, the official says. Much of it comes down to paperwork: the two sides are discussing cutting the time it takes to register an Egyptian drug in Algeria to about six months, down from two to three years now, and easing the administrative, customs, and regulatory hurdles Egyptian companies face, the official says.

Joint manufacturing is on the table too: The talks cover partnerships with Algerian factories and transferring Egyptian technology and manufacturing know-how. “We’re looking at shipping drugs manufactured in Egypt to complete packaging locally in Algeria,” the official says, which could help Egyptian companies build up their presence there gradually. And the two sides are studying supplying drugs that Algeria’s own industry doesn’t fully cover.

That local angle matters, because Algeria makes most of what it uses. Local production covers more than 83% of national needs in a market that topped USD 5 bn last year, and the country’s drug import bill shrank to USD 515 mn in 2024 from USD 1.25 bn in 2022, Algerian Pharma Industry Minister Ouacim Kouidri told parliament in February. A 10% share would mean more than USD 500 mn a year in sales, or close to 40% of the USD 1.3 bn Egypt’s pharma sector exported last year, by our math. That’s about as much as Algeria imported in all of 2024, which is likely why making and packaging drugs inside Algeria is central to the talks.

Algeria is one piece of a bigger export drive: Pharma exporters are targeting about USD 1.6 bn by end-2026, after shipping USD 550 mn in the first five months, Export Council for Medical Industries head Mohy Hafez told us in September. The government wants USD 3 bn by 2030. Faster registration is a big part of the case: mutual-recognition transactions in Africa “can save companies at least a full year of procedures,” Hafez said at the time.

Opening more markets should also make Egypt’s pharma sector more attractive to investors looking to come in through partnerships or acquisitions, the official adds. The export push leans on the regulator’s standing abroad. The Egyptian Drug Authority reached the WHO’s maturity level 3 for medicines regulation in December 2024.

The billet dispute is still on

The government is asking steelmakers for much the same evidence the Administrative Court wants, three weeks before the rolling mills’ challenge to the billet duties is heard on 14 November. Companies must submit the data and documents required for a permanent committee to assess the impact of the measures, the industry and investment ministries said in a joint statement after meeting rolling mills and integrated producers separately. The committee brings together the industry, investment, and supply ministries and the Egyptian Competition Authority. By our read, its brief overlaps closely with what the court asked of the Investment Ministry: data on how imports have hit the market and whether local industry has grown under the duties.

Both camps got a message: Investment Minister Mohamed Farid told billet producers they must make billet available in line with their licensed capacities, in the quantities, grades and specs the mills need. Industry Minister Khaled Hashem told the companies that secured new billet licenses, meant to push rolling mills into melting their own, to move quickly into production. The meetings follow up on Decree 121 of 2026, which made the safeguard duties on steel imports final. The duty stands at about 12.1% now and steps down a point a year.

The court ruling will decide who carries the cost of protecting Egypt’s steel capacity. Rolling mills buy billet and roll it into rebar, so the duties land directly on their input costs, while integrated producers melt their own and need the duties to keep imports out. By our read, keeping the duties locks that split in for the rest of their three-year term. Scrapping them would reprice feedstock for every rebar producer in the country and weaken the case for the new melting licenses, which rest on the promise that local supply will close the gap.

IN CONTEXT- The mills have been campaigning to scrap the duties for weeks. They planned to meet on 11 October to coordinate and to take their case to the presidency and the Cabinet, on top of the court filing. Integrated producers told us the market isn’t short. They report 13.7 mn tons of billet capacity against 8.8 mn tons produced, with roughly 5 mn tons idle, and say they already sell about 170k tons a month, against the roughly 100k tons the mills need. The mills say imported billet is what keeps them running.

Bye bye, paper

Customs is going paperless: The Egyptian Customs Authority will stop accepting paper documents from Thursday, 29 October, under a decision seen by EnterpriseAM, after a year of study and Cabinet approval. Moving forward, importers and companies registering their accounts on Nafeza, the national single window for foreign trade, will need an e-seal tied to their tax ID and an electronic signature from the main authorized user. Nafeza is urging companies to get both ready ahead of time to avoid delays. Several of the government bodies working with Customs have already stopped accepting paper, which has been slowing clearance, a Nafeza source tells EnterpriseAM.

Importers can also get answers before they ship: For the first time, the authority is offering an optional advance-ruling service, a Customs Authority source tells EnterpriseAM. For EGP 5k, an importer gets a binding written decision within 60 days on a product’s tariff line, duties, and rules of origin. The decision applies at every port and is valid for one year on classification and three on origin.

That should cut down time at the port: The service, which meets Egypt’s commitments under the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement, should cut disputes over estimated duties, freight charges, and tariff lines, along with the demurrage fees importers pay to foreign companies while those disputes drag on, the source says.

Both moves should speed up clearance, which has already gotten faster: Average release times fell to about 5.8 days in August from around 16 days in June 2024, Investment Minister Mohamed Farid said at the time. The government is aiming for two days and eventually just a few hours, as we reported in April.

PSA-

WEATHER- Cairo is warming back up today, with a high of 29°C and a low of 19°C, a good two degrees above yesterday’s 27°C at both ends, according to our favorite weather app.

It’s a notch warmer on the coast in Alexandria too, with a high of 27°C and a low of 19°C.

And over the weekend, expect to see a touch more warmth in the capital (a high of 30°C) and as low as 26°C for our friends on the Mediterranean.

The big story abroad

Meta will begin offering shares without voting rights in January 2027 to pay for its costly AI expansion. The decision comes as Meta spends heavily on advanced chips and data centers to compete with AI rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Italy has brought in tougher security rules after rioters, some of them minors, reportedly looted shops, started fires, and damaged property in Milan’s main shopping area amid anti-government protests. A government decree will send 500 extra soldiers to Milan for the rest of the year, make parents pay for damage their children cause, and make it easier to take minors aged over 14 to court.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told US envoy Steve Witkoff that Russia is willing to restart three-party peace talks with the US and Ukraine in early November. The talks would focus on setting up a postwar security arrangement for Russia and Ukraine. Officials from the three countries have met on and off throughout the war.