Facebook’s Free Basics no-charge internet access app is shut down. Cue the conspiracy theories.

TL;DR

Current account deficit soars 150% (Speed Round)

VAT not a condition of USD 500 mn African Development Bank loan (Speed Round)

Solar industry will make its pitch to DFIs, international institutions, banks in January (Speed Round)

Facebook’s zero-charge internet access app is shut off in Egypt — and it’s become an international story (Speed Round)

Year in Review, part 5: What we we did this year, what we learned about our readers

By the Numbers + Mixed responses to December rate rise signals a risk of further hikes in the first half of 2016

** A QUICK REMINDER **

Enterprise is off tomorrow for New Year’s Day, so there will be no Weekend Edition in the morning. We’ll be back at our usual time, and in our usual format, on Sunday just after 6am.

Thank you all once more for starting your day with Enterprise, and from all of us here to all of you: Our very best wishes for a happy, healthy and profitable 2016.

SPEED ROUND

The nation’s current account deficit soared 150% to USD 4.0 bn in the first quarter of the state’s 2015-16 fiscal year, according to data released by the Central Bank of Egypt yesterday. Oil and merchandise exports fell, with non-oil exports dipping 14% to USD 3.4 bn. Tourism receipts, meanwhile, plunged 17.5% to USD 1.7 bn as total tourist nights fell 9.1% to 23.7 mn. Net FDI inflows stood at USD 1.3 bn (largely unchanged from USD 1.4 bn a year ago), buoyed by a 48.5% rise in net inflows into greenfield projects, the CBE said. Reuters has coverage here and you can read the full central bank statement here in pdf.

VAT not a condition for AfDB loan, but gov’t “needs to do it” –Nasr. The receipt of the USD 500 mn loan from the African Development Bank, approved earlier this month, is not contingent on Egypt enacting a value-added tax, but the government “needs to do it,” said International Cooperation Minister Sahar Nasr. “The budget projections of this fiscal year are calculated while taking into account that the VAT will be in force as of 1 January,” the minister told Ahram Online’s Deya Abaza and Bassem Abo Alabbas. With cabinet and State Council approval in hand, Nasr said, “The question is whether we ratify it now or wait a few days for the new parliament to ratify it.” Nasr says the AfDB loan should be in Egypt’s account “within hours”; Parliament is expected to convene on 10 January;

International institutions and development finance agencies will meet in Cairo in January for a workshop to evaluate the finance needs of the renewable energy industry, Al Borsa reports, citing an unnamed senior official at the Ministry of Electricity. Confirmed projects licensed under the feed-in-tariff regime need some USD 3 bn in financing, the newspaper estimates, adding that Cairo Solar’s Hisham Tawfiq says industry players are facing significant challenges accessing the FX they need to reach financial close. Among the institutions expected to participate in the ministry-led workshop are the International Finance Corporation, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the African Development Bank, Germany’s GIZ and Egyptian banks.

Cairo, Riyadh to ink up to 12 investment and cooperation agreements on 5 January: The signing will come at gathering of top ministers from both sides in Riyadh next week, AMAY says, citing an unnamed government official. The Saudi side is particularly interested in real estate (including work on the new administrative capital), tourism projects in Sharm El Sheikh, and petrochemicals.

A joint government-industry working group will begin developing a comprehensive system to license manufacturers and industrial concerns, Trade and Industry Minister Tarek Kabil said yesterday. The group, led by Kabil’s ministry, will look for ways of streamlining the full licensing and permits process and will likely recommend a decentralized one-stop shop-style approach for all regulatory and security signoffs. Legislative and regulatory changes will be required to implement the group’s recommendations, Al Borsa suggests.

“Egypt is running out of ways to get a hold of dollars,” Bloomberg’s Ahmed Namatalla and and Ahmed Feteha write, noting that “to buy the nation’s international bonds instead of Treasuries, investors are demanding the highest premium in more than two years, with the yield spread exceeding the average for emerging-market debt.”

President Abdel Fattah El Sisi inaugurated the 1.5 mn feddan land reclamation project yesterday, Al Ahram reports. Ahram Online has a nice summary of the president’s remarks and detail on phase one of the program. An emailed statement from Ittihadiya, meanwhile, notes that phase one of the program will be run by the recently established New Egyptian Countryside Co., which will “issue the terms and conditions documents for 500,000 acres. The president instructed the cost of land to be affordable to buyers, calling on banks that will finance the purchasing process to reduce interest rates to less than 6%.” The statement also notes that the president is pushing to delivery new industrial cities for marble (in Sinai), furniture (Damietta) and leather (Robeiky). Finally, on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, El Sisi “assured the Egyptian people that negotiations are going well and that Ethiopia reiterated its commitment not to cause any harm to Egypt and its people.”

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Editor’s note: The name of the program below is Facebook [without cost] Basics. We don’t use that word in email because it affects the rate at which we’re delivered to our readers’ inboxes.

We’re ashamed to say that this is all news to us: “Facebook says it is “disappointed” by the shutdown of a [without cost] internet service in Egypt,” the Associated Press reports. Facebook says it launched the service for some 3 mn people in Egypt two months ago with mobile operator Etisalat Misr. The social network told the wire service that, “We’re disappointed that [without cost] Basics will no longer be available in Egypt. More than 1 mn people who were previously unconnected had been using the Internet because of these efforts.”

With all the depth and insight of a mud puddle, the international press is having a field day with this one: Fortune ‘reports’ that “though it’s not clear why Basics was shut down, it’s not surprising considering the country’s relationship with social media services. During the Arab Spring in 2011, a period during which mostly young people in Middle East countries like Egypt mobilized for political change, services like Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in organizing efforts and spreading information. And tensions seem to [be] running high ahead of the five-year anniversary of Egypt’s Arab Spring protests on Jan. 25.” Tech industry publications, meanwhile, are linking the end of the service here to a ban on it in India, where “net neutrality activists, academics, and entrepreneurs, have very publicly decried Basics as a way for Facebook to control internet access.” The New York Times is also getting in on the story.

There may not be anything fishy going on, though: Al Masry Al Youm quotes an unnamed industry source as saying the shutdown has nothing to do with national security. Instead, he says the service was licensed for only a two-month period beginning 30 October. Reuters concurs, and adds that Facebook will release a statement on the issue today. AMAY suggests that allowing the program to continue only with Etisalat may be a fair-competition issue.

Facebook’s page on the program says that “[Without charge] Basics by Facebook provides people with access to useful services on their mobile phones in markets where internet access may be less affordable. The websites are available [without cost] without data charges, and include content on things like news, employment, health, education and local information. By introducing people to the benefits of the internet through these websites, we hope to bring more people online and help improve their lives.” Excluding Egypt, the service is active in 36 countries.

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A Cairo appeals court has agreed to hear Islamic scholar and former talkshow host Islam El-Behery’s appeal of his conviction on blasphemy charges. El-Behery was arrested Monday night and transported to Maadi’s Tora Prison. The court is due to hear the appeal on 4 January.

The Transport Ministry is reviewing three proposals to operate a Nile taxi service, Al Mal reports. Transport Minister Saad El-Geyoushi also said during a visit to the banks of the Nile with senior ministry officials late yesterday that the ministry is prioritizing a Nile cargo route linking Cairo to Alexandria and Damietta.

Speaking of KSA: At the rate we’re going, Saudi Arabia could have a value-added tax before we do: “VAT will be introduced gradually and be completed within two years, which is the time set for application in GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries in 2018. It will be around 5 percent, which is the lowest worldwide,” Arabian Business quotes Saudi Finance Minister Ibrahim Alassaf as saying.

Russia may sell Egypt helicopters for its two new Mistral-class helicopter carriers, Russian news site Sputnik reports. “If the according contract is signed at the beginning of 2016, the helicopters could be delivered by the end of 2017, consultations have already begun,” Sputnik said, citing a senior defense official in a news agency report. The Mistrals “are designed to carry 16 Ka-27/29 Helix anti submarine/assault and Ka-52 Hokum B strike helicopters,” it added.

Global growth will be disappointing in 2016 –IMF chief: International Monetary Fund chief Reuters quotes the International Monetary Fund head as writing “Global economic growth will be disappointing next year and the outlook for the medium-term has also deteriorated” in an op-ed for Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper. The IMF chief pointed to rising interest rates in the United States and an economic slowdown in China alongside low commodities prices and rising financial risk in emerging markets as underpinning her pessimism. Read the full summary in Reuters here; Lagarde’s piece for Handelsblatt was, at press time, hiding behind a paywall we are unable to search.

Hillary Clinton will become the next president of the United States and Brent crude will end 2016 above USD 50 per barrel. Those are but two of the many single-paragraph predictions for the new year from the Financial Times (paywall).

Egypt in the News: With the end-of-year news slowdown tightening its grip on the globe, international media coverage of Egypt turned to evergreen stories. To our east, the Jerusalem Post piggy-backs on a Cairo Post story from earlier this week (itself relying on a Youm7 story from 2014) on the fate of important Judaic texts languishing in Downtown’s Sha’ar Hashamayim Synagogue. In the global echo chamber that is media, the story has now crossed back from the Jerusalem Post into Arabic in Al Masry Al Youm.

Meanwhile, Reuters has revived the ancient trope that is stories about the City of the Dead, while the Huffington Post runs with a call to action and graphic photos of dogs shot in the latest bid to control Alexandria’s street dog population.

CORRECTING OUR CORRECTION: Kellogg acquired Mass Foods, the owner of Temmy’s brand cereals, for USD 50 mn. That’s 50 mn green, not masry. Akher kalam, we promise. H/t Elwy T.

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2015: THE YEAR IN REVIEW, PART 5

WHAT WE DID THIS YEAR

Enterprise in numbers:

402 — The number of issues we wrote this year. 247 in English, 155 in Arabic.

11x — Our growth in subscribers from 31 December 2014 through today.

3 — The number of staff at Enterprise on 1 January, excluding our founders.

11.5 — Editorial and technical staff today, excluding our founders. (As for the half — we share one person with Inktank).

1 — New product launched this year, our Weekend Edition.

WHAT WE LEARNED ABOUT OUR READERS IN 2015

WHO YOU ARE

There are 17,000 or so of you receiving the email edition as of this morning, of whom 46% will read the English edition and and 54% will read the Arabic. Roughly 5,000 more read us each day on the web, on corporate intranets and on team emails. (All stats below are for our English edition.)

Odds are good you’re pretty senior: Well over 60% of our English-edition readers are C-suite, MDs, heads of departments (or one size or another), principals and business owners. We’re delighted to also have high school students, folks at universities and fresh grads on the subscription list.

Google thinks that 74.5% of our readers on the web are male and that about 55% of you are between the ages of 25 and 44. (Google doesn’t get to talk to our email dispatch system, so take those figures with a grain of salt.)

Banking and finance, fund managers, traders and manufacturers and government officials (Egyptian) and diplomats (Egyptian and others) are our largest audiences. Next up: Energy / oil and gas folks, industrialists, retailers, tech and telecom, and real estate. And plenty of lawyers, accountants, journalists, DFI / IGO staffers…

There’s a 54% chance you’re reading this in Egypt. Our next-largest concentrations of readers are in the UAE, the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UK.  Yesterday, we were opened by readers in 53 different countries in all.

The majority of you read us before 10am, and more than 200 usually open each day’s edition within 15-20 minutes of our hitting “send” at 6:05am. Our peak hour: Between 8am and 9am. We also see “bumps” in traffic at about 3pm CLT (when U.S. readers hit the office) and then again in the early evening — maybe on your drive home?

You’re super-engaged: As a one-year-old publication, we’re honored that we have open and click rates that are well over double the industry average. In fact, our “gross” open rate is on many days better than that reported by the New York Times.

Just about 70% of you read us on your phone or tablet. If you’re not reading us on a mobile device (and odds are good it’s an iPhone or iPad), you’re most likely using one flavour of Outlook or another.

And there are — thank you — are more of you all the time: We grew 20% between 20 November and 20 December, the last time we calculated our one-month growth rate.

WHAT YOU READ

Little gives us more pleasure than tracking the most-clicked links in Enterprise.

Based on that, we can tell you this: You’re news junkies, but you also like cars and funny videos and research papers. You have a soft spot for talkshow hosts being beaten up on the mean streets of Manhattan and Paris. You’re slightly more interested in negative coverage of Egypt than positive, reinforcing our theory that we, as a nation, are self-trolling. And given the choice between a news story and the underlying primary sources (a presentation, disclosure, earnings or company statement), you’re more interested in the latter than the former.

You click, in total, on slightly more Arabic sources than you do English, but it’s the English stuff that tends to go viral with you.

The most-clicked link in Enterprise in 2015: Do we need devaluation, or just want it? (Enterprise)

The most-clicked videos:

• French senator stuns CNN’s Christiane Amanpour by dropping the F-bomb live on air (CNN)
• Enterprise’s first-ever (and to-date only) television advertisement (Enterprise)
• The world’s worst AGM took place in Kuwait (Youtube)
• John Oliver waves poetic on the Paris attackers (Youtube)
• ONTV’s Youssef El Housseiny fellow talkshow host Mohamed Sherdy are punched and insulted in New York (Video hosting site)
• Ahmed Moussa is assaulted in Paris (Youtube)
• Driver crashes a USD 1.4 mn Ferrari (BGR)

The most-clicked stories on international issues

• Terrorist ‘magazine’ Dabiq, showing the bomb Daesh claims brought down the Metrojet flight over Sinai (Jihadology blog)
• Saudi Arabia: The wake-up call (Financial Times)
• Egypt’s president on fighting Islamic State, U.S. relations (PBS)
• A Brutal Week in Markets, But What Comes Next? (Mohamed El Erian, Bloomberg View)

The most-clicked opinion pieces

• Salah Diab’s op-ed on his arrest — “The Test” in Arabic (Youm7)
• The CBEs approach to bank regulation is doing the economy a monstrous disservice (Enterprise)
• Salah Diab’s op-ed on his arrest — “The Test” in Arabic (Egypt Independent)
• How much more expensive can homes in Cairo get? (Enterprise)
• Generation Hels: Why that Nestlé Crunch ad hit such a nerve (Enterprise)

The most-clicked tweet and Facebook post

• Open letter to the citizens of Mexico by Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, published on the MoFA Facebook page and in major Mexican newspapers (Facebook)
• UAE Vice President Mohamed bin Rashid Al Maktoum takes President Abdel Fattah El Sisi for a spin in his SUV (Twitter)

The most-clicked stories on domestic issues

• Website of The Capital Cairo
• Meet your new Council of Ministers (Enterprise)
• Car prices in Egypt (Al Borsa, image)
• Re-Engineering Egypt’s Economy, by President Abdel Fattah El Sisi (Wall Street Journal)
• Yalla fe seteen dahya (Business Insider)

The most-clicked images

• Fawzia Fuad of Egypt, the Egyptian princess who became Queen of Iran as the first wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (Imgur)
• Photos from the scene of the assassination of Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat (Reuters)
• An incredibly creepy photo of Turkey’s Erdogan with U.S. President Barack Obama (AskSam.tr)

The most-clicked documents and reports

• Leaked correspondence on Egypt between Hillary Clinton and her “private spy ring” (Cryptome, pdf)
• Wall Street Journal’s Eye on Egypt report (WSJ, pdf)
• Egypt: A market for natural gas from Cyprus and Israel? (German Marshal Fund)
• The Economist’s ranking of full-time MBAs (Economist)
• MENA Real Estate: A Positive Outlook, Despite Current Challenges (Nouriel Roubini’s Economonitor)

The most-clicked presentation

• The Petroleum and Mining Sector in Egypt: Unlocking Egypt’s energy potential (EEDC presentation by then-Oil Minister Sherif Ismail, pdf)