Welcoming an old friend: Edita backs your morning read as we roll out our redesign

Good morning, wonderful people. Thanks for starting your workweek with us.

I’m delighted to welcome an old friend as the latest backer of your morning read — and to show off our fresh coat of paint.

I’ve known (and admired) Hani Berzi and his team for longer than is polite to say. We love Edita’s brand- and innovation-led approach to growth at home — and anyone who has gotten me talking about strategies for international growth has heard me wax poetic about how Hani chooses expansion markets, including his use of Egypt as a manufacturing base from which to export to more than 20 countries.

And while the rest of us have pushed into “red oceans” like the Gulf, Hani has looked for white space, setting up successful on-the-ground operations in Morocco and Iraq. (Forgive me the mixed metaphor — ‘tis still early.)

Edita joins us this morning as our newest pillar supporter, and we couldn’t be prouder to have them on board. It’s thanks to Edita and all of our other commercial partners (including Qalaa Holdings, the new sponsor of this note) that EnterpriseAM remains available to you every morning without charge more than a decade since we first hit “send.”

Given how brand- and design-forward Edita is, it’s fitting that they’re joining us on a redesign morning. The morning edition now matches the look and feel of our afternoon and weekend editions. We think the font is a lot easier to read and the design is much crisper. Look for more improvements in the months to come.

We’ll start each morning with a short welcome note here from me or Abdelhamid, our national editor for Egypt. After tl;dr, you’ll find The Lede, where we’ll dive deep each day into a story that’s in the headlines — or that should be.

Today’s Lede is a deep dive into an ambitious bid to export green compute to Europe, where the Sheta family’s Income group joins a list of ambitious projects backed by other first-class names in our community, including Hassan Allam Utilities and A15, which committed USD 400 mn earlier this year to the first phase of a big data center bid.

Nationwide, we have only about 60 MW of installed data center capacity — a figure that puts us way behind the Gulf in a sector that is becoming critical to the global economy. And our legislative framework isn’t friendly to the cloud, whether you’re talking Central Bank of Egypt restrictions on its use or the ongoing bureaucratic wrangling over who has access to what. We’ll continue covering the tick-tock on this generationally important story in EnterpriseAM Egypt and our newly launched AI + Innovation edition, out Tuesdays and Thursdays.

We’re also going to be focusing on tighter writing and more of the human voice that makes us … us. Our vision is simple: To be the Arab world’s business daily, telling stories of our region’s people and companies that you won’t find anywhere else.

Thank you, everyone, for choosing to start your day with us. Writing you every morning is the honor of my professional career. –Patrick