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Tuesday, 29 Aug 2023

What We’re Tracking Tonight
For Your Commute
Enterprise Recommends
Go With The Flow
The Enterprise Entertainment Calendar

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Shaping the future of education in Egypt

Today at a glance

1

The Big Story Today

CIHC could close its stake sale in Eastern in 1H 2024.
2

FOR YOUR COMMUTE

“Hackers” are trying to fix racism in AI.
3

FOR YOUR COMMUTE

AI is stealing books, not just jobs.
4

ON THE TUBE TONIGHT

Silo: Another dystopian series to add to your list.
5

Sports

Egypt’s basketball team may have a shot at the Paris Olympics.
6

Under the Lamplight

Manifest lifelong health with Outlive by Peter Attia.

Tuesday, 29 Aug 2023

What We’re Tracking Tonight
For Your Commute
Enterprise Recommends
Go With The Flow
The Enterprise Entertainment Calendar
1

WHAT WE’RE TRACKING TONIGHT

THIS EVENING: CIHC could close its stake sale in Eastern in 1H 2024

Good afternoon dearest readers, and happy hump day. We can see the weekend in the distance (can you?) and are looking forward to the last weekend of the Sahel season.

THE BIG STORY TODAY

Eastern stake sale could close in 1H 2024: The government hopes to complete its sale of up to a 15.3% stake in EGX-listed tobacco maker Eastern Company during the first half of next year, Al Borsa reports, citing sources it says are in the know. However, Eastern Company said in an EGX filing (pdf) that it had not been informed of any updates since last Tuesday.

THE BIG STORY ABROAD

It’s another mixed bag today, with the international press not settling on one key news story. Among the headlines to skim this afternoon:

  • Putin not attending Prigozhin’s funeral has caught some interest, as Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, shared that the Russian president is not likely to attend the former Wagner chief’s funeral after his plane crashed last week. (Reuters | CNBC)
  • Dispute over the EU’s EUR 86 bn budget plan could put Ukraine in a precarious situation: More time and reductions have been called for as struggling national budgets will be strained further with the requested EUR 86 bn in additional funding. The top-up aims to pad the EU budget and ensure four years of support to Ukraine. (Financial Times)
  • Saudi Arabia records the lowest foreign reserves figure. The move away from investments that build their central bank into more riskier ones resulted in the kingdom’s hard currency steadily declining from nearly USD 725 bn in 2014 to USD 407 bn this July. (Bloomberg)

HAPPENING NOW- Burhan in Egypt for his first trip abroad since Sudan conflict broke out: President Abdel Fattah El Sisi met with Sudan’s army chief General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan today in New Alamein, according to an Ittihadiya statement. This marks Al Burhan’s first trip out of Sudan since the start of the conflict in April with the Paramilitary Rapid Response Forces.

** CATCH UP QUICK on the top stories from today’s EnterpriseAM:

  • ADES pulls the trigger on its IPO: Cairo-born regional oil and gas services company ADES International has announced its intention to float on the Saudi Tadawul. The company is planning to offer a 30% stake (338.7 mn shares), which could raise more than USD 1 bn.
  • Non-banking financial services firm GlobalCorp has closed a EGP 2.54 bn issuance of securitized bonds, divided into three tranches rated AA+, AA, A by Middle East Rating & Investors Service (MERIS).
  • Pickalbatros sells + leases back Sharm hotel: Pickalbatros Hotels & Resorts Group has signed an agreement with Beltone Financial’s leasing subsidiary to sell and lease back one of its hotels.

CHECK OUT OUR AGENDA-

The Enterprise Finance Forum is taking place on 18-19 September at the St. Regis Hotel in Cairo. This flagship forum is the latest in our must-attend series of invitation-only, C-suite-level gatherings that allow senior members of our community to openly and frankly discuss critical issues in key sectors of the economy.

This is our first two-day event,which should give us plenty of time to dive into the nitty gritty of this industry we love. Our panels will see CEOs, bankers, investors and founders gather to discuss the future and trends shaping banking, finance, fintech and NBFS.

Our full agenda will be out at month’s end . Among the topics we’ll be discussing:

  • Looking into the crystal ball: Top industry CEOs will join us on stage to answer tough questions on where we are as an industry, the forces that will shape all of our businesses going forward, and their views on dealflow in the year ahead.
  • Surviving nuclear winter: We discuss how private equity and venture capital players are tackling challenges including fundraising and deployment in an environment in which it’s awfully difficult to price your local asset in USD terms.
  • The robots are coming: We explore what the coming AI and big data means for the industry in our part of the world and what can bankers, NBFI, and fintech players do to capitalize on them.
  • What do you do when nobody wants to be a banker — and when those who are already (investment or commercial) bankers are either (a) dreaming of doing their own startup or (b) moving to Dubai (or, increasingly, Riyadh)? We go deep into the weeds with industry leaders on how they’re building talent for tomorrow.
  • NBFIs are a bubble. Prove me wrong: We chart the explosive rise of NBFIs and ask whether the industry is ready for a wave of consolidation. We’ll dive into whether consumer finance is starting to mature as a segment — and ask which sector is next.
  • What does 2024 hold in store for fintech: We dive deep into which categories are getting traction, which segments will account for the lion’s share of future growth, what business they would start today if they could, and what we can expect of the sector in the year ahead.
  • What’s a bank, anyway? Wherein we talk challenger and neobanks with the players looking to shake up the brick-and-mortar industry.

** NEW: MORE NETWORKING TIME- Our agenda includes expanded networking time, including an expanded coffee break and a post-event networking room for you to interact with your peers and speak one-on-one with the team at Enterprise.

STAY TUNED for more detail about our exciting agenda in the weeks to come.

TAP OR CLICK HERE if you want to express interest in attending. We’ll be sending out the first batch of invitations soon.

Do you want to become a commercial partner? Ping a note to Moustafa Taalab, our head of commercial.

☀️ TOMORROW’S WEATHER- Watch the mercury rise to 41°C at its peak in the daytime and drop to 25°C in the evening, our favorite weather app tells us.

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2

FOR YOUR COMMUTE

“Hackers” are trying to fix racism in AI + “Quiet cutting” to slash jobs without firing people

Indie hackers in the US are working on making AI less biased and racist, with backing from the White House, NPR reports. Defcon — a hackers’ convention that takes place annually in Vegas — brought together independent hackers, major tech companies, White House representatives, and people with no background in tech, to purposely find flaws in AI to help the companies behind them reprogram the technology to make it more impartial and accurate.

There’s a genuine problem to solve: The founder of an Oklahoma tech company, for example, reported racially-inclined answers when asking the bots about HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) NPR reports. Another hacker typed a prompt which resulted in AI generating a poem about why rape is good, the New York Times noted.

The consequences of these biases are significant. As the technology spreads like wildfire, concerns about its risks — many of which are reportedly yet to be identified — are also on the rise. These concerns include race and gender biases and general misinformation that could be detrimental to users. For instance, AI can make discrimination worse in areas like financial, housing and hiring decisions.

AI is stealing books, not just jobs: The Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood famed for The Handmaid’s Tale has found herself in a dystopian sci-fi tale not of her own writing, Atwood writes in the Atlantic. Meta’s AI language model is being trained upon tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of pirated works among its training set of 170k books. Atwood pondered whether the AI bot trained on 33 of her stolen books may be able to, one day, churn out an Atwood novel on request “like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos).” When/if this day comes, Atwood asks whether “I myself can then be dispensed with — murdered by my replica.” A recent article published in the Atlantic also looked at how “The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.”

A new trend of “corporate restructuring” has seen businesses slash jobs without actually doing any firing: Companies like Adidas, Adobe, and IBM have been helming this movement, leading to US-based companies announcing a 42% drop in job cuts in July in comparison to June, according to the Wall Street Journal. They maintain that this method was adopted to keep their top talent within the company and to fill new positions without incurring the costs that comes with the “old strategy”: Hiring people whose experience reflects the role’s needs, which isn’t always the case when it comes to reassignment.

Between a rock and a hard place, for both employees and the employer. The reasons behind restructuring are less about business strategy and more about the bottom line. Workers who have been reassigned cite not only the new position’s incompatibility, but also the lower pay. However, by keeping the same employees, companies save three to four times the new position’s salary, which is what it costs to hire a new employee. Perhaps more duplicitously, by reassigning their workers unsatisfying roles and/or giving them pay cuts, they encourage them to quit on their own accord, absolving the company from paying severance or unemployment benefits. Legal recourse is limited as well, as workers can only make a compelling case if they can prove that their reassignment was targeted behavior following a pattern of discriminatory treatment.

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3

ENTERPRISE RECOMMENDS

Silo: Another dystopian series to add to your list

? ON THE TUBE TONIGHT-
(all times CLT)

Silo : Humanity’s only safe haven in a dystopian future. Based on the best-selling trilogy by Hugh Howey, a community living in an underground bunker start to question their reality: Whether their survival outweighs their curiosity about what lies outside this safe haven. Despite evidence that life outside the carefully crafted shelter is not possible, their curiosity gets the better of them and they discover that a rebellion in the past has erased the history of the survivors. Chief among those harboring doubt is Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) whose responsibility as an engineer is to feed the silo’s vital furnace. They realize that they do not know why the silo was built, nor do they know whether they will ever get out of it in the future. Throughout the 10-part series, starring Ferguson, Common, and Tom Robbins, we realize that protection and safety are often coverups for something much darker. If you enjoy dystopias and shows like The Mandalorian, Jennifer Connelly’s Snowpiercer or The Matrix Trilogy, then add this series to your watchlist on Apple TV.

? Egypt achieved its first victory in the FIBA World Cup: After losing the chance to qualify for the next round in the FIBA World Cup following defeats against Lithuania and Montenegro, the Egyptian national team achieved its first victory in the final match against Mexico with a score of 100-72 today, to finish the group stage in third place nabbing four points from two defeats and one victory, so far.

The Pharaohs journey in the World Cup is not over yet: The team missed the chance to qualify for the round of 16 where it would have had the only African qualification card for the Paris Olympics 2024 directly, if it achieved best rank among the African teams.

Nevertheless, Egypt still has a route to the Olympics. Our team will play two matches with the third and fourth-placed players in Group C, which includes the United States, Greece, New Zealand and Jordan, in order to determine the 17th to 32nd-ranked owners. Egypt needs to come out on top in the two matches to snatch the qualification ticket to the Olympics — provided that it is not snatched by any other African team in the final World Cup standings. If this is not achieved, our team will be forced to compete in the international competitions that qualify for the Olympics, in which 23 teams compete for a single ticket.

The third round of the Basketball World Cup will conclude tomorrow with the following matches:

  • South Sudan v Serbia (11am)
  • Georgia v Venezuela (11am)
  • United States v Jordan (11:40am)
  • Cote d'Ivoire v Brazil (12:45pm)
  • Slovenia v Cape Verde (2:30pm)
  • China v Puerto Rico (3pm)
  • Greece v New Zealand (3:40pm)
  • Iran v Spain (4:30pm)

⚽ …and on the football pitch: Today we have several matches in the second round of the Premier League, most notably, the one that brings Fulham and Tottenham for a face-off at 9:45pm.

We also recommend that you follow these matches:

  • Swansea v Bournemouth (9:30pm)
  • Chelsea v Wimbledon (9:45pm)
  • Nottingham Forest v Burnley (9:45pm)
  • Plymouth v Crystal Palace (9:45pm)
  • Wolverhampton v Blackpool (9:45pm)
  • Newport County v Brentford (9:45pm)
  • Doncaster v Everton (10pm)

? OUT AND ABOUT-
(all times CLT)

Make the last weekend in Sahel count with the last breaths of the New Alamein Festival :

The Citadel Music and Singing Festival continues today and wraps up next Thursday, 7 September.The festival will be held at the Salah El Din Citadel with several acts lined up:

  • Mostafa Haggag will perform today.
  • Ali El Haggar will be performing this Thursday, 31 August.
  • Musician Hisham Kharma and the Tunsian singer Ghalia Benali will be performing on Sunday, 3 September.

After Dinner, or Baad Al Eshaa, is a performance by El Warsha Theatre groupin AUC Tahrir Square’s main garden today. Watch actor Hassan El Geretly and his cast take you back in time to Cairo’s art scene in the 1920s. There tickets are on the house but seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Sonne, a film by Austrian-Kurdish Kurdin Ayubwill be screening in the Austrian Cultural Forum today starting from 7pm. The film discusses a Viennese teenager who wants to sing but has to face the challenges she faces from her muslim identity. Get your tickets by registering on this link.

Aziz Maraka x City Center Almaza. Jordanian singer Aziz Maraka will be performing today at the opening of City Garage Hub at City Center Almaza Mall tomorrow. Tickets are available on Tazkarti.

El Morabba3 is coming to Egypt. Jordanian rockband El Morabba3 will be performing at two concerts, the first of which will be at the closing ceremony of the International Summer Festival at Bibliotheca Alexandrina this Friday, 1 September. The second will be at El Sawy Culturewheel on Sunday, 3 September. Tickets are available here for Bibliotheca Alexandrina and here for El Sawy CultureWheel.

DJs Kygo , Tiësto, Kungs and Frank Walker are performing on Saturday, 28 October at the Giza Pyramids. The concert will be part of the next edition of the four-day Palm Tree Music Festival (PTMF) which will be held from Thursday, 26 October until Sunday, 29 October.

Get your running shoes ready for the 2023 edition of the El Gouna Half Marathon, which is scheduled to take place on Saturday, 11 November. You can sign up for the marathon from here — and catch the lowest registration price with the early bird special which starts today and ends Saturday, 30 September.

? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

Who said humans cannot scientifically extend their lifespan? In his book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia attempts to answer this question. Attia is a doctor who received his training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in general surgery and worked with the NIH as a fellow at the National Cancer Institute as a surgical oncologist where he focused on immune-based therapies for melanoma.

His medical background makes his book a compelling read — he chooses to challenge mainstream medicine and manifests several medical strategies that could help one prevent the chances of chronic disease and to extend long-term health. The author further delivers new nutritional interventions, techniques for effective exercise and sleep, and ways for tackling mental and emotional health. He also reveals many secrets regarding the accuracy of cholesterol tests, importance of exercise, and seriousness of emotional health. Through his work, Attia motivates people to be proactive rather than reactive by not surrendering to what he deems as outdated medicine: The traditional doctor’s visit and assignment of tests and medicines.

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4

GO WITH THE FLOW

Earnings watch: Abu Qir Fertilizers + Mopco

EARNINGS WATCH-

Abu Qir Fertilizers’ net income dipped to EGP 1.68 bn in 4Q 2022, down 19.5% y-o-y, according to the company’s earnings release ( pdf ). The company’s revenues dropped 0.7% y-o-y to EGP 4.3 bn during the quarter. On a full-year basis, Abu Qir reported EGP 14.6 bn in net income in FY 2022-23, up 61.7% y-o-y, while revenues climbed 32% y-o-y to EGP 21.6 bn.

Misr Fertilizer Production Company’s (Mopco) consolidated net income after tax rose 6% y-o-y to EGP 3.97 bn in 1H 2023, according to its financial statement (pdf ). Revenues climbed 8% y-o-y to EGP 9.42 bn during the first six months of the year.

MARKET ROUNDUP-

The EGX30 rose 0.23% at today’s close on turnover of EGP 2.7 bn (31.1% above the 90-day average). Local investors were net sellers. The index is up 27.6% YTD.

In the green: Elsewedy Electric (+6.9%), Qalaa Holding (+6.4%) and GB Corp (+3.7%).

In the red: Edita (-2.2%), ADIB (-2.0%) and Sidpec (-1.6%).

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THE ENTERPRISE ENTERTAINMENT CALENDAR

AUGUST

29 August (Tuesday): Aziz Maraka concert, City Center Almaza Mall, Cairo.

29 August (Tuesday): Sonne film screening, Austrian Cultural Forum Cairo, Qasr El Nil, Cairo

29 August (Tuesday): Jewish Synagogues from the Land of Lost to the Land of Dispersion Lecture, Sawy Culturewheel, El Zamalek, Cairo

31 August (Thursday): Ali El Haggar concert, Citadel Festival for Music and Singing, Citadel Salah El Din, Cairo.

31 August (Thursday): Double Zuksh, Omar Kamal, El Sawareekh concert, New Alamein Festival, New Alamein.

SEPTEMBER

1 September (Friday): Wegz concert, New Alamein Festival, New Alamein.

1 September (Friday): El Morabba3 band concert, Summer International Festival, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria.

2 September (Saturday): Sharmoofers band concert, New Alamein Festival, New Alamein.

3 September (Sunday): El Morabba3 band concert, El Sawy Culturalwheel, El Zamalek, Cairo

3 September (Sunday): Hisham Kharma and Ghalia Benali concert, Citadel Festival for Music and Singing, Citadel Salah El Din, Cairo.

4 September (Monday): Improv for All! With Radwan, The Greek Campus, Downtown Cairo

6 September (Wednesday): Improv for All! With Radwan, The Greek Campus, Downtown Cairo

7 September (Thursday): Um Kalthoum puppet show, Sawy Culturewheel, El Zamalek, Cairo

7-9 September (Thursday-Saturday): Handicrafts market, Sawy Culturewheel, El Zamalek, Cairo

9 September (Saturday): Badya SuperCycle, Badya, 6th of October

11 September (Monday): Improv for All! With Radwan, The Greek Campus, Downtown Cairo

18 September (Monday): Retro Concert at Sawy Culturewheel, El Zamalek, Cairo

21-23 September (Thursday-Saturday) L’Etape Egypt by Tour de France, Sharm El Sheikh

26 September (Tuesday): Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (TBC).

28 September (Thursday): National holiday in observance of Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (TBC).

OCTOBER

6 October (Friday): Armed Forces Day.

13-20 October (Friday-Friday): El Gouna Film Festival (GFF).

28 October (Saturday): Djs Kygo, Tiësto, Kung and Frank Walker concert, Giza Pyramids.

NOVEMBER

11 November (Saturday): El Gouna Half Marathon 2023, El Gouna.

15-24 November (Wednesday-Friday): Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF).

EVENTS WITH NO SET DATE

2023: The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum.

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