Friday, 9 December 2016

The Weekend Edition

A QUICK NOTE TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS

We publish the Enterprise Morning Edition in English and Arabic from Sunday through Thursday before 7am, with a focus on the business, economic and political news that will move markets each day. What you’re reading now is our Weekend Edition, which is light on news and heavy on stories to read, videos to watch, and podcasts to which you may want to listen on Friday and Saturday (that being the weekend for the vast majority of our readers). The Weekend Edition comes out each Friday between 9:00am and 9:30am CLT. We’re in beta and in English only right now.

We’ll be back on Sunday at around 6:15am with our usual roundup. Until then: Enjoy the weekend.

** DO YOU WANT TO READ OUR GCC EDITION? **

We recently launched the beta version of our Enterprise GCC edition, and are now publishing Sunday-Thursday at 3 am UTC/ GMT (7 am UAE, 6 am KSA, 5 am Cairo), give or take a few minutes. We’re in beta, after all. You can sign up via this link and may view the Enterprise GCC site online at gcc.enterprise.press. Comments, suggestions and criticisms are always welcome at editorial@enterprise.press.

Speed Round, The Weekend Edition

Speed Round, The Weekend Edition is presented in association with

If you didn’t have time yesterday (or missed it in your inbox), read our exclusive interview with Central Bank of Egypt Governor Tarek Amer, released yesterday as we named Amer our 2016 Newsmaker of the Year. We promise you it will give you a view on the man — and the decision to float the pound — that you haven’t had before. It’s also a chance to try to read between the lines and see what’s in store for us in 2017.

And a quick reminder: Sunday is a national holiday. So, if you’ve inadvertently scheduled meetings (as a couple of us had done), now is a good time to cancel them. There will be no Enterprise on Sunday, but we’ll be back in your inbox before 6:15am on Monday. Have a fantastic long weekend, everyone.

Random observation of the weekend: There is no more perfect morning than a morning spent with family in a nice bistro, on a bright, sunny, breezy December day at the start of a long weekend. Just saying.

The economic reforms of Saudi Arabia’s Mohamed bin Salman go nowhere. Yemen turns into KSA’s version of Vietnam as “new taxes replace generous subsidies and lead to growing discontent.” Protesters are in the streets and Iran grows assertive … and in five more jumps, MbS will be deposed, Trump will turn his back on KSA and open warfare between Iran and Saudi breaks out.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Bloomberg’s annual (and wonderful) Pessimist’s Guide 2017. From a destabilized Middle East to Yalta 2.0, from China and America sliding into economic warfare to the “Internet of (Bad) Things,” there’s a doomsday scenario to please everyone here, told in short, bite-sized Bloomberg news alerts to tell you how the story could unfold. H/t Sherif k.

Bloomberg’s annual survey of book recommendations by people smarter than us: Bloomberg says “many leaders from the worlds of academia, finance, industry, politics and technology turned to the pages of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance.”

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde chose Le Dernier des Nôtres by Adélaïde Clermont-Tonnerre and Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes.

McKinsey &Co’s Managing Director Dominic Barton says The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly contains “a brilliant argument for why the digitization of everything and the industrialization of ‘cognition’ are going to change the world far more profoundly than anything we have seen to date.” He also recommends The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan.

Eurasia Group’s President Ian Bremmer went for But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman and The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver.

Mohamed El-Erian’s picks were Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar and the Alan Greenspan biography The Man Who Knew. The full list of contributors and their recommendations can be found here.

The best jazz of 2016, according to Will Layman of Popmatters: Layman says 2016 was “yet another year in which the dire economic situation for creative musicians did not dampen their astonishing output.” He didn’t stick to the usual top 10 format and, instead, put together his top 10 pairs to pick his 20 best jazz records “identified in stylistic diads, ranked loosely from most sublime to merely breathtaking.” Layman’s top pair came “from a new master and an old one. One is clean and cool while still ripping with adventure and the other is a jumble of wonder.” Layman picked Moving Still by Jonathan Finlayson & Sicilian Defense and Old Locks and Irregular Verbs by Henry Threadgill’s Ensemble Double Up. You can sample the whole list here. H/t Marginal Revolution.

Another end-of-year list, this time just looking at economics books: Manchester University Professor Diane Coyle gave Five Books her recommendation for the best economics books of 2016. Coyle says: “When I hear the critiques of economics I think, ‘But no! We do really interesting, insightful, real world studies! You just don’t know what it is that we’re really doing’” and this view has shaped her selection of the top five economics books for the year. Her list:

  1. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon
  2. The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens by Samuel Bowles
  3. Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent by Brooke Harrington
  4. The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan
  5. Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee

What the guy who makes iPhones would tell Donald Trump or: Taking The Donald to school on bringing manufacturers back to the US. Bloomberg Gadfly’s Tim Culpan showed us what a letter to US president-elect Donald Trump from Terry Gou, Chairman of Foxconn Technology Group, the company that actually manufactures iPhones, would read like — and it is brilliant.

The fictionalised Gou tells Trump that next time he speaks with Taiwan’s president, it could be him. “We have a lot in common, you and I. We’re both bn’aires (although I am richer), we both like to build things, we’re both married to gorgeous younger women.” The key policy advice from Gou: “you don’t actually have to create any jobs, you just have to make people think you’re going to create them. I am sure you’re familiar with the concept.” Also, manufacturing iPhones in the US might not go down too well: “I hear you’ve been telling people you’re going to get Apple to build stuff in America. Well, you see, Tim Cook doesn’t build things, I do. In fact, I got [USD 75 bn] in revenue from them last year… If you want iPhones to be made in America, I can make that happen, too. Heck, I can set up a production line in Trump Towers if you like, but the costs will be yuuuge… You see, I don’t manufacture in China just because it’s cheaper, but because thousands of suppliers are there … I can deploy more robots in the U.S., sure, but it can take months to train them whereas humans can be taught in a few hours. Besides, more robots mean fewer jobs.

Bumping up your import tariffs won’t change the equation much, but give me tax breaks, subsidies to hire workers, cheap electricity and free land, and I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. Let me know what numbers you want to Tweet, and I’ve got your back… Like that wall you’re planning to build, somebody’s going to have to pay. And it won’t be me, let me tell you.”

The way forward with banking regulatory reform: We do not know how effective recent banking sector regulatory reforms will be in future, economics and finance professor at IESE Business School Xavier Vives writes in CEPR’s policy portal, Vox. “Regulation became lax in the years before the subprime crisis. Capital ratios as a percentage of assets for banks declined, as well as liquidity buffers,” Vives writes, and “prudential regulation did not properly take macroprudential concerns into account. The lack of attention before the crisis to liquidity requirements led to diminishing liquid assets in bank balances. Banks had no cushion to limit asset sales when they needed cash, and hence contributed to systemic risk… Finally, there were inadequate resolution procedures and tools, which increased the cost of restructuring and liquidation.” Following the crisis, regulatory reform, according to Basel III regulations, focused on macroprudential regulations to counteract the external effects of bank behaviour that impact systemic risk, including initiatives to separate commercial and investment banking, ring-fencing retail activities in banks, and being able to “resolve failing financial firms in an orderly manner.”

That said, Vives notes that, while the reforms are heading in “the right direction,” we can still question if they go far enough. “Structural banking reform proposals to separate investment and commercial banking activities are bound to have mixed results. On one hand, they will tend to lower the complexity of banking institutions and improve the resolvability and credibility of resolution procedures, as well as reduce the likelihood of conflicts of interest and interdependencies within group and financial markets. On the other hand, they may increase the supervisory burden and the danger of misidentifying prohibited or permitted activities, and limit scope and diversification economies.” Vives believes “prudential regulation should employ an all-inclusive approach that considers interactions between conduct (capital, liquidity, disclosure requirements, macroprudential ratios) and structural (activity restrictions) instruments.”

Coordination between prudential regulation and competition policy is also required, “because of the trade-off between competition and financial stability that is inherent in regulatory imperfections.” Vives says establishing regulation and supervisory procedures “will be challenging when many of the basic theoretical and empirical foundations of regulation and supervision … are not fully developed.” There are many questions ahead of regulators right now, particularly as “regulation is typically driven by the previous crisis, not the next one.”

Space exploration is now the ultimate status symbol: Despite the SpaceX rocket carrying a USD 200 mn Facebook satellite exploding at the Cape Canaveral launch base in Florida last September, technocrats are undeterred, writes Dan Tynan for The Guardian. For Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, its galactic ambitions that drive him. “One [path] is that we stay on Earth forever and then there will be an inevitable extinction event,” he said. “The alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization, and a multi-planetary species.” Musk has previously outlined an ambitious timeframe for colonizing Mars that could see people on the red planet by 2024.

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos likens the space industry to the early days of the internet when fiber optic cable laid for voice communications in the 1960s and 1970s ultimately paved the way for today’s data-driven economy. But while Musk views space as a plan B, Bezos believes in an unlimited future economy where much of our manufacturing takes place in space, sparing Earth from pollution.

The guys who are rulers of the universe now are the nerds,” says longtime tech journalist Ashlee Vance. “They were all geeks raised on science fiction and the vision of space we had in the 1960s and 70s. Now they have the money to make this a reality.”

The biggest barrier to exploration was always the cost. While NASA estimates the cost of a successful shuttle launch at USD 450 mn, analysts from the University of Colorado had the number closer to USD 1.5 bn. Musk and Bezos are trying to save tens of mn of USD by reusing the expensive launch vehicles. “They are right to try and solve that problem,” says Silicon Valley Space Center managing director Sean Casey. “The space industry is the only one that grinds up its vehicles.” But while the 700 passengers who paid USD 250k for tickets into sub-orbit are still waiting six years after Branson initially predicted Virgin Galactic would take flight, Blue Origin’s rockets have not yet made it into orbit and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolauncher won’t be fully operation for several years, it may take decades before a system that can propel man-made objects through space fast enough to reach a star over a human being’s lifespan is designed.

Some people say that, in this digital age, the written word is dead, but the French have proven otherwise. In France, the publishing start-up shortEdition built the world’s first short-story vending machines. These “distributeurs d’histoires courtes,” or short-story dispensers, print out short stories on a thick strip of paper that resembles a supermarket receipt. The best part? It’s free of charge to the public. The prototypes first appeared in the mountaintop town of Grenoble in France. “In the first month, about ten thousand stories were printed,” writes Pauline Bock for the New Yorker. These free stories are now available all over France and places can host the dispensers for a fee of EUR 500 a month.

The Godfather trilogy’s Francis Ford Coppola liked them so much, he installed the very first one in his European-style cafe in San Francisco last May. “I love the idea of a dispensing machine that doesn’t dispense potato chips or beer or coffee or coca cola for money but gives you art,” Coppola said (watch, runtime 1:34). And who writes the stories, you ask? Well, shortEdition offers a free publishing platform, and so does Coppola’s online writing workshop, where editors review amateur writers’ submissions and add their top picks to the database for the masses to read.

Let’s all become “influencers”: Kristin Addis left her job as an investment banker in Southern California and decided to travel the world — and through a crafty approach to marketing and affiliate links, she’s making as much today as she did before she quit her job, writes Libby Kane for Business Insider. “She earns … money through affiliate sales from her website, sales of her book, and work with tourism board and brands.” Her Instagram profile has 79.2 thousand followers on Instagram – which is not that much in Egyptian influencer bubble world, by the way, but okay. Have a read if you’ve ever dreamt of binning it all and making some cash before this influencer bubble bursts.

Philip Morris International bets against conventional cigarettes: The tobacco giant applied to the US Food and Drug Administration seeking approval for its new tobacco vaporizer, the iQOS, reports Reuters. PMI says the device, which heats tobacco just enough to vaporize the active ingredients, has less than 10% of the harmful chemicals in cigarettes. The cost of developing the iQOS was around USD 3 bn, BBC reports. PMI CEO Andre Calantzopoulos says a time is approaching to start envisioning a phase out period for cigarettes. The most obvious competitor to the iQOS are e-cigarettes, but they only have a conversion rate of 20% with traditional smokers, he adds. Meanwhile, iQOS trials in Japan have retained 70% of the smokers who tried the alternative. Despite the growing publicity surrounding vaporizers and e-cigarettes, they remain a nascent technology that forms only a tiny part of tobacco firms’ income, writes Rob Davies for The Guardian.

UK-based rival British American Tobacco makes e-cigarettes under the Vype brand and this month launched a competitor to iQos called glo, but revenue from “next generation products” are still so small that the company does not disclose it, describing income from the division as “not currently material.”

People are starting to adjust and adapt to information overload: Fewer adults in the US of A today feel overwhelmed by the availability and constant stream of information that is characteristic of contemporary life than did a decade ago, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. Ironically, “those who own more devices are also the ones who feel more on top of the data and media flows in their lives. Those who are more likely to feel information overload have less technology and are poorer, less well-educated and older.” In other words, those who have the ability to access information at any time (through a smartphone on the road and a computer/tablet at home) are less overwhelmed than individuals who can only access information at specific times and therefore come face-to-face with the volume of the information all at once, rather than spaced out. For those of you who don’t feel that’s the crux of the issue, you can always take a look at NPR’s take on how to deal with “the barrage of news updates flowing to our screens,” from earlier this year.

Watch This

Using Jedi mind tricks to beat procrastination: Turns out one of the most useful ways to get yourself into new habits is to underestimate yourself and lower your standards, entrepreneur and podcast king Tim Ferriss tells BigThink (watch, runtime: 10:20) . Plan for only 5-10 minutes at the gym for three days a week, not an hour for five days a week, he says. The idea is to not feel like you’re failing, and avoid performance anxiety. Other tricks include avoiding Parkinson’s Law (work will fill whatever time you set for it) by setting yourself patterns of working for 25 minutes and five minute breaks, social accountability for you work, especially with financial incentives involved.

_StoryHed_! How the tiny nation of Fiji won an Olympic gold medal

The most unbelievable story in rugby: The first Fijians to ever win a medal at the Olympics were the rugby sevens team, who won gold in Rio. The extreme devotion — to their nation and their sport — of the team from the tiny island nation (along with their uncanny singing ability) has captured the world’s imagination, creating one of the best sports-related feel-good stories we’ve come across in a while, captured in a short documentary. Talking about the peculiar Fijian style of play, Coach Ben Ryan says: “The way we play, through chaos comes order … we play a chaotic game, but for us, that’s an ordered game. We know what we’re doing… We are so unpredictable to other teams.” The spirit of the Fijian team, from preparing for the Rio Olympics up until winning it, shows throughout, and as Ryan puts it “I’ve never had a group of players that have laughed as much and are as happy. They’re probably the poorest group of players I’ve ever coached as well, yet they’re certainly the happiest… they’re really resilient, they’re robust.” Fiji thrashed Great Britain in the final in Rio 43-7 (full match here). (runtime 17:27).

Listen to This

Tracking down the people behind fake news websites our extended family members share news from on Facebook: NPR’s Planet Money has had enough of all the fake news everyone’s random aunt / uncle / cousin / high school friend shares on social media. The Planet Money team goes on a detective mission, taking one fake news story until they trace who wrote it, who published it and why (runtime 18:45).

The “taboo” of feminism: Why is feminism still regarded as a word to avoid, the BBC’s Katy Watson asks? There is still a gender-pay gap and a corporate and political glass ceiling to break. Watson also looks into why using the word “empowerment” is proving to be more palatable, with its bigger focus on individual achievements rather than a collective movement for equal rights. “Empowerment,” as one commentator argues, shifts the onus from society, which is not providing women and minorities with equal treatment, to individuals being asked to “improve” certain aspects about themselves. In this episode, Watson, besides exploring her own feminist journey, hears from the self-styled “factual feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers, of the American Enterprise Institute, on why modern feminists may have gone too far. She speaks to the feminist campaigners behind the iconic Ms Magazine, as well as the co-founder of Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, Meredith Walker, who explains why young girls need better role models, especially online. Watson also travels to the Hollywood Hills to see positive body image pioneer, Jess Weiner, who helped reshape Barbie into a more human-looking form, and has become an iconic figure in the battle for confidence (runtime 29:45).

And speaking of women’s experience in the workplace: The McKinsey Podcast found that company gender-diversity programs are falling short and need to “think differently to ignite change” (runtime 21:25)

Something That Made Us Think

Can television be fair to Muslims? “Even in this TV renaissance, most [Muslim] characters are on shows that rely on terrorism — or at least, terrorist-adjacent — storylines. Other kinds of Muslim characters are woefully absent across the dial,” Melena Ryzik writes for the New York Times. The piece is largely a transcript of a discussion between five showrunners about whether they believe this phenomenon can be changed in The Time of The Donald, or if it will prove to be “more difficult than ever.”

The partakers in the conversation include “Quantico” creator Joshua Safran, actor and creator of “Halal in the Family,” Aasif Mandvi, “Little Mosque on the Prairie” creator Zarqa Nawaz, the brains behind indie film “Amreeka Cherien Dabis,” and Howard Gordon, the executive producer of “24” and “Homeland.” For us, Homeland should forever be remembered as the show that, while pretending to understand the inner workings of Arab and Middle Eastern (read: terrorist) communities, didn’t even realize that “Arabian street artists” they hired for set design added graffiti calling out the series’ bigotry.

Ryzik pretends not to reach a conclusion on the headline question at the end of the piece, but the hurdles the showrunners mentioned in creating a series depicting Muslims fairly, from producers demanding the inclusion of terrorism in the plot to viewers discrediting the shows as propaganda, kind of tell us the answer is no.

BEYOND THE RUBICON

RunUp to RiseUp

Did you know that 5,000 people from around the globe are flying into Cairo this weekend, all of them eagerly looking for investment opportunities? We are talking about professional investors ready to write cheques to invest in Egyptian businesses that could potentially create hundreds of thousands of jobs. There’s only one catch though — the opportunities they are looking for are startups.

The startup economy, and whether or not it actually brings something to the table, can be a divisive issue with passionate supporters and detractors. Tech-loving futurists will boast about startups with a gleam in their eye and prophesize about how startups will eventually solve all human problems. Traditionalists will dismiss startups as pipe dreams that don’t really create anything of value and contribute little or nothing to GDP or the creation of employment opportunities.

Whether you love them or hate them, the fact is that startups have become integral to our everyday lives. Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Google, Netflix, Spotify and even the mobile, web or email application you are using right now are (or at the very least, were) startups. Steve Jobs brought us Apple and the numerous gadgets and goodies that come with it. Tesla, led by the iconic Elon Musk, has revolutionized the auto industry by producing the leading fleet of slick, electric-powered cars. He is also leading SpaceX with the ambition to get us to Mars. Hundreds of new and innovative products in education, healthcare, finance and many other sectors are being produced for customers by startups each year.

A recent study by MIT of the impact of startups across a number of US cities reinforces the arguments for the startup economy and concludes that a small group of high-quality, fast-growing startups can deliver both jobs and innovation while attracting sizeable investment and delivering a significant economic impact. There are, however, some valid arguments that downplay the impact of startups on job creation and how much the startup economy really contributes to GDP.

For example, Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for USD 1 billion, famously had only 13 employees when they were acquired. Not exactly a great advertisement for startups and job creation. As for economic impact, despite the fact that in 2015 around USD 60 billion was invested by venture capital firms in startups in the US, because of the high fail rate (around eight out of every 10 startups fail), it is hard to accurately calculate how much startups add to economic growth.

Putting the academic debate to one side, few can deny that Egypt needs increased investment (especially if we can attract foreign direct investment) as well as more innovation. Startups are also very good at identifying problems and coming up with practical and commercially viable solutions. We are a country with many problems; it stands to reason that having an army of problem solvers is something we should nurture. Finally, the export potential of many of these startups, especially the tech-based startups, is huge.

So, whether or not startups can also contribute to job creation and economic growth is more of a bonus. The options here are not binary; we can incentivize investment in startups and other sectors that have a more proven record for job creation and strong economic growth, such as manufacturing and agriculture. It is not a zero-sum game.

Egyptians should take pride that despite the upheaval and uncertainty of the last few years, the Egyptian startup economy (or “ecosystem” as insiders like to call it) has become a force to be reckoned with, and investors from all over the world are taking notice.

The RiseUp Summit has, from humble beginnings, become one of the leading startup conferences globally, attracting exciting entrepreneurs from Africa and the Middle East along with top investors with deep pockets who are willing to splash the cash if the right investment opportunity comes their way. To put things into perspective: the Egypt Economic Development Conference held in Sharm El Sheikh in March 2015 attracted 2,000 delegates; in the same year, the RiseUp Summit attracted double the number of attendees and they anticipate even more this year.

So, who are the Egyptian startups everybody is raving about? The traffic jams and challenge of getting from one place to another is a constant daily struggle; Bey2ollak stepped in to provide an excellent application to try to alleviate the pain. Power shortages and access to clean water is something thousands, if not mns, of Egyptians suffer until this very day. Karm Solar came to the rescue to provide small to mid-scale solar power and desalination solutions to entire villages.

If you are just about to graduate and don’t have the luxury of a wasta, your chances of getting your dream job are slim indeed, but have no fear: Wuzzuf and HireHunt are here. Need to set up a conference or event to boost your business? You’re a few clicks away with Eventtus. The list goes on, but don’t take my word for it — check out Forbes’ recent coverage of the 20 most promising startups coming out of Egypt.

Souq.com became the first startup in the Middle East valued at over USD 1 billion (or a “Unicorn” in startup jargon) and several others, including Careem, are expected to follow suit in the near future. The reason thousands of people are coming to Cairo this weekend is because they believe Egypt can join this elite club of ecosystems that can produce talent rich, high quality, fast growing businesses and they want to get in on the action.

If they have faith in us to do the business, we should too.

Aly Shalakany is senior partner at Shalakany Law Office, which he joined from Linklaters in London. Aly is a noted specialist in finance, projects and mergers and acquisitions; his column appears exclusively in our Weekend Edition, offering an “inside baseball” look the intersection of business, economy and finance from the point of view of a practitioner at the top of his game.

The Week’s Most-Clicked Stories

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

Enterprise is a daily publication of Enterprise Ventures LLC, an Egyptian limited liability company (commercial register 83594), and a subsidiary of Inktank Communications. Summaries are intended for guidance only and are provided on an as-is basis; kindly refer to the source article in its original language prior to undertaking any action. Neither Enterprise Ventures nor its staff assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy of the information contained in this publication, whether in the form of summaries or analysis. © 2022 Enterprise Ventures LLC.

Enterprise is available without charge thanks to the generous support of HSBC Egypt (tax ID: 204-901-715), the leading corporate and retail lender in Egypt; EFG Hermes (tax ID: 200-178-385), the leading financial services corporation in frontier emerging markets; SODIC (tax ID: 212-168-002), a leading Egyptian real estate developer; SomaBay (tax ID: 204-903-300), our Red Sea holiday partner; Infinity (tax ID: 474-939-359), the ultimate way to power cities, industries, and homes directly from nature right here in Egypt; CIRA (tax ID: 200-069-608), the leading providers of K-12 and higher level education in Egypt; Orascom Construction (tax ID: 229-988-806), the leading construction and engineering company building infrastructure in Egypt and abroad; Moharram & Partners (tax ID: 616-112-459), the leading public policy and government affairs partner; Palm Hills Developments (tax ID: 432-737-014), a leading developer of commercial and residential properties; Mashreq (tax ID: 204-898-862), the MENA region’s leading homegrown personal and digital bank; Industrial Development Group (IDG) (tax ID:266-965-253), the leading builder of industrial parks in Egypt; Hassan Allam Properties (tax ID:  553-096-567), one of Egypt’s most prominent and leading builders; and Saleh, Barsoum & Abdel Aziz (tax ID: 220-002-827), the leading audit, tax and accounting firm in Egypt.