Ask your carpenter where the wood comes from

Anyone who has finished an apartment in Egypt knows the routine. The keys arrive, then come the kitchen, wardrobes, and doors. People compare finishes, handles, and prices carefully. Far fewer ask what the board itself is made of — or where it came from.

That question reaches further than the kitchen. The board inside most kitchens, wardrobes, and doors is medium-density fiberboard (MDF), made by pressing wood fibers with binding materials and other additives. For years, Egypt relied on imports for much of it, leaving an everyday building material exposed to shipping lead times and exchange-rate movements.

We built NILEWOOD so Egypt could make its own MDF at scale. Our plant in Sadat City pressed its first MDF board in June 2025 and moved into commercial operations late last year, with an annual capacity of 200k cubic meters in a range of board sizes. It sits about a kilometer from the Sadat City forest, and Valmore has reclaimed and planted 2.65k acres of camphor, casuarina, and sesbania trees, irrigated with treated urban wastewater.

MDF production is energy-intensive. The fiber has to be dried, and the board pressed at high temperature. At NILEWOOD, a Vyncke energy system burns tree-pruning residues, including mango and citrus trimmings, to generate part of the process heat. That puts agricultural waste to use while adding a renewable energy source to production.

Local production also changes the relationship with the workshops and furniture makers that turn board into the rooms people live in. They can deal directly with the manufacturer on specifications, quality, and supply — and a supplier a few hours’ drive away can respond faster and keep them better informed than a shipment still at sea.

Commercial operations were only the beginning. Our focus now is on ramping up production, fine-tuning operations, and building a reliable customer base in Egypt while looking for markets beyond it.

Valmore set up NILEWOOD in 2017, years before the first board came off the line. Building the plant and the supply base around it meant committing capital for the long haul. That is what the group means by Investing Beyond Capital: putting the production capacity and supply chain in place before the market can rely on them.

So yes, ask your carpenter where the board comes from. The more interesting part is what changes when the answer is Egypt: local manufacturing capacity, shorter supply chains, and a homegrown source for a material the country has long imported.

Nashed Adel, CEO, NILEWOOD