The US just gifted us a whole lot of Pfizer + e-Finance sets price range, date for IPO

Well, friends, we’ve made it through another quarter together, and our reward is a super-busy news day with which to end the week. We’ve hit the trifecta, with IPO, M&A and investment news all in one issue. So let’s jump right in:

HAPPENING RIGHT NOW- A flight from the US landed at around 3pm CLT carrying 1.6 mn doses of Pfizer’s covid-19 jab as a gift from the United States government to the people of Egypt. That, ladies and gents, is friendship.

THE BIG STORIES TODAY so far-

#1- e-Finance has issued an indicative price range for its IPO and set Monday, 18 October as the day for its EGX debut, the state-owned fintech platform and payments infrastructure firm said in a statement out around noon today (pdf). The company expects to price its shares in the EGP 12.50 to EGP 13.98 range and should announce the final price for the offering on or around 9 October. E-Finance is on the road (virtually) now, meeting with global institutional investors, CEO Ibrahim Sarhan told us yesterday. The subscription period for domestic retail investors will run 6-13 October. E-Finance is offering 14.5% of its shares for sale in the transaction, including both existing and capital increase shares.

#2- EFG Hermes is reportedly in talks to acquire a 45-49% stake in Ignis Energia, one of Spain’s largest photovoltaic developers, reports Spanish-language press Expansion in a story picked up by Reuters. The transaction could reportedly cost EUR 1 bn and occur through a capital increase, Expansion said. EFG Hermes declined to comment when we reached out earlier today. EFG Hermes-managed renewable energy investment platform Vortex Energy had said a few months ago that it was eyeing investments worth around USD 2 bn in Europe and the US.

#3- Middle East-focused Anchorage Investments is developing a USD 2.5 bn industrial complex in the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone), producing a range of derivatives and petrochemical products, according to a company statement (pdf).

^^ We’ll have more on each of these stories in Sunday’s edition of EnterpriseAM — look for it in your inbox by 6am CLT.

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THE BIG STORY ABROAD- The US government will shut down at midnight tonight (Eastern time) if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t broker a budget agreement. Fortune has a rundown on everything that has to happen to avert a shutdown, while Reuters, the FT, WSJ and New York Times have wall-to-wall coverage — and you can expect lots more in the hours to come.

Sound like an Beltway insider: Politico’s Morning Money says there won’t be a shutdown, with Ben White and Aubree Eliza Weaver writing that “the Senate is expected to pass a bill this morning extending funding until Dec. 3, which will then go to the House and to President Joe Biden’s desk.” That will keep government working, but it won’t address the fate of some USD 4 tn worth of infrastructure spending Biden wants to pass, nor will it raise the debt ceiling.

IN OUR CORNER OF THE WORLD- Egypt could be one of the top beneficiaries as global companies trim back sprawling global supply chains, Reuters suggests, noting that fashion brands are “increasingly turning away from globe-spanning supply chains and low-cost manufacturing hubs in Asia.” Benetton, for example, is “bringing production closer to home, boosting manufacturing in Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt,” aiming to cut its reliance on Asia by half next year.

The Egypt advantage: If it takes 4-5 months to get goods from Asia to Europe (a figure that has ballooned to 7-8 months right now thanks to lack of ships), “when clothes are produced in Egypt, delivery to warehouses and stores in Europe can be shortened to two or two and a half months.”

The trend should be positive for major garment manufacturers such as Alaa Arafa, Tolba Group and the folks at Mobaco, among many others?

YOUR AFTERNOON MUST-READ includes video, too: Mohamed El-Erian, Cathie Wood (Ark Investments) and Scott Minerd (Guggenheim Investments) talk about deflation, inequality and cybersecurity in Bloomberg’s Wall Street titans warn of the next big risks for investors.

ALSO IN THIS NECK OF THE WOODS- Shares of STC’s internet unit surged on the Tadawul in their market debut today, part of what Bloomberg is calling a “Gulf IPO rush” that has seen Dubai edged out of the regional driver’s seat by both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.

SIGN OF THE TIMES- Baller move. NBA players who skip games because they refuse to be vaccinated will not be paid, Sports Illustrated reports, in a decision that could ramp up tension with stars including Kyrie Irving and Andrew Wiggins, who are resisting getting jabbed. About 90% of the NBA’s players are fully vaccinated.

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???? WELCOME TO 4Q2021-

LET’S START WITH THE GOOD- You have two long weekends this month, including 7-9 October (Thursday-Saturday) in observance of Armed Forces Day. We can also expect to have a Sunday or Thursday off thanks to the Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday, which is formally observed on Monday, 18 October. Those will have to tide you over until year’s end, unless you want to declare yourself an honorary ‘Murican and use a day off to celebrate US Thanksgiving at the end of November.

THE BAD- Your morning commute is about to get worse — and your afternoon drive home won’t be getting any better: Public schools are back in session on Saturday, 9 October.

ALSO- The House of Representatives is back in session on Saturday, 2 October to kickstart the 2021-2022 legislative session. The Senate follows suit on Tuesday, 5 October.

October will also see the Central Bank of Egypt meet at month’s end to review interest rates, while the coming 10 days will see the release of data points including the PMI, foreign reserves and monthly inflation figures.

It could be a huge month for two key figures in the global economy — IMF boss Kristalina Georgieva and US Fed chief Jay Powell. Georgieva is caught up in a scandal in which she allegedly inflated data to make China look better. She’s on the outs with the Biden administration and will face plenty of pressure when the IMF and World Bank annual meetings take place in the week starting 11 October. Meanwhile, Powell’s term as Fed chairman isn’t set to expire until February 2022, but President Joe Biden is reportedly nearing a decision on whether to give him a second term. Powell’s stock dimmed this week after progressive Democratic leader Elizabeth Warren called him a “dangerous man” and said she’d oppose a second term.

PSA- Winter trading hours are in effect as of today. Shops and malls will close one hour earlier at 10pm (11pm on Thursdays, Fridays and national holidays) while cafes and restaurants will shutter at midnight rather than 1am. As during the summer, essential services such as grocery stores, supermarkets and pharmacies are exempt from the rules and can open and close their doors when they want.

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A BIG, HONKING, IMPORTANT PSA- The Central Bank of Egypt is NOT calling you to update your KYC or ask questions about your account(s) or recent banking activity. Neither is your bank of choice. Fraudsters appear to have gotten their hands on one or more telemarketing lists and are placing calls in which they use social engineering tactics to try to brow beat you out of your personal information. The tactics, in a call one of us received this afternoon, included aggressive threats of fines and frozen accounts if we didn’t cough up the information they wanted.

AS A REMINDER- Our friends at the CBE tell us no bank will ever call you unbidden asking for your personal information or grilling you about recent transactions. If that happens, go to your branch, log into your online banking account to check for messages, or call your wealth manager or another contact at the bank you know in person. You can also dial the short number for your bank’s contact center to ask for help.

How do you handle a call like the one we received today? Hang up — and block the number that called you. We think muttered incantations about that person’s parentage and where they can spend the afterlife are optional, and only after you hang up.

The one caveat: You will definitely need to identify yourself and provide proof of who you are if you call the bank asking for help.

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

• Your look ahead at the business-relevant legislation on the House of Representatives’ agenda. You can expect more clarity on immediate priorities next week, according to senior leaders of House committees.
• El Sisi meets White House national security adviser: Libya, the GERD dispute, the Israel-Palestine peace process, and human rights were all on the agenda yesterday during talks in Cairo between White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan and President Abdel Fattah El Sisi.
• Cutting red tape for the tourism sector: The Madbouly cabinet says it is looking into legislation and new regulations that it thinks will simplify licensing rules for hotels and tourism companies.

ONGOING EVENTS-

The Cairo International Fair started today at the Cairo International Conference Center and will run through 8 October.

The Egypt Projects 2021 construction expo also started today at the Egypt International Exhibition Center and wraps on Saturday, 2 October.

Dubai’s Expo 2020 starts tomorrow: The event, which takes place somewhere on the planet once every five years, runs for six months and will be open seven days a week. You can learn more here.

Check out our full calendar on the web for a comprehensive listing of upcoming news events, national holidays and news triggers.

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☀️ TOMORROW’S WEATHER- Temperatures will drop gradually this weekend from 33°C on Friday to 31°C on Sunday as fall weather takes hold, our favorite weather app tells us. Overnight weather will be more fitting for the season in the 20°C range — you may want to remember to take a light jacket with you on evening excursions.

Can Jon Stewart’s new show become the first successful streaming talk show? The release late tonight of satirist Jon Stewart’s new bi-weekly show, The Problem With Jon Stewart, on Apple TV+ is the latest attempt by streaming platforms to bring the talk show format to the streaming world, writes the Wall Street Journal. Stewart, who rose to fame hosting The Daily Show, has been off of the screen for six years and comes back to a different climate of ‘wokeness’ that he will have to contend with. He’ll also have to adapt to the new format and audience as he abandons cable TV for the more exclusive streaming platform. Apple TV isn’t the first streaming site to attempt to bring talk shows onto its roster of successes, but the talking heads format kept failing as audiences opt for more binge-worthy, on-demand content. Nonetheless, if anyone can break the pattern it’s Stewart whose political satire inspired shows all over the world. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Also on the small screen: It seems Netflix might be cooking up at least one spinoff from Stranger Things as mulls whether the series has franchise potential. The company’s co-CEO dropped the hint in a wide-ranging interview at the Code Conference while sitting in a red chair talking with the always awesome Kara Swisher, Deadline reports.

Calories in, calories out is [redacted]. Complete and utter [redacted], and there are few who make that point better than Gary Taubes, the ace science writer turned researcher whose seminal Is Sugar Toxic? in the New York Times Magazine back in 2011 helped lay the groundwork for a revolution in how scientists, physicians and journalists think about why we gain weight. It’s a theme into which Taubes dove deeper in his well-reviewed 2017 book The case against sugar. Now, Taubes is taking on “CICO,” the much-touted and never lastingly successful approach to weight loss that suggests weight gain is due to an “energy imbalance” between the calories you ingest and those you burn off. It’s given rise to the “move more, eat less” school — and we all know how well that works. Whether you’re trying to shed a few kg or just nerd out on public health and biology, you’ll want to read his latest for the health site Stat: How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity.

Cancer is no laughing matter, but damn: “Are you someone who enjoys the unsolicited opinions of strangers and acquaintances? If so, I can’t recommend cancer highly enough. You won’t even have the first pathology report in your hands before the advice comes pouring in. Laugh and the world laughs with you; get cancer and the world can’t shut its trap,” writes Caitlin Flanagan in I’ll tell you the secret of cancer for the Atlantic. It’s her compelling, funny, angrifying distillation of what she’s learned in the nearly 20 years since she was diagnosed with cancer.

We have a confession to make: We’re business and finance geeks who obviously love media — but we’ve not yet watched Succession. We were recently reminded of this when one of the nicest (and smartest) people we know reminded us to put the drama in our up-next queue. That made this piece in the New Yorker on The real CEO of “Succession” all the more interesting. Meet Jesse Armstrong, the TV writer who keeps the Roy family “trapped in its gilded cage.”

Will private equity firms spread remote work, virus-like, out of tech to make “remote first” the default for other industries? That’s the contention of tech entrepreneur Chris Herd, who used remote work to create a successful business. Almost a generation ago, open offices were pioneered (in their latest incarnation) in the tech world before “spreading outward” to other industries. Herd sees private equity doing the same thing now, saying PE outfits “will begin hiring away remote-first experts from big technology companies. They will then buy up companies in other sectors, deploy this expertise to help them successfully abandon long-term office leases, and hire better talent, allowing them to reap the immediate financial rewards that these moves generate.” Read the full argument (and more) in the New Yorker’s Is going to the office a broken way of working?

University endowments are “minting bns in a golden era of venture capital,” writes the Wall Street Journal, notching “their biggest investment gains in decades, thanks to portfolios boosted by huge venture-capital returns and soaring stock markets.” The question, though, is how long it can last as bears are calling the top of the market — and thanks to uncertainty about how much of the gains many of the endowments report are still unrealized.

Egyptian cotton plays a starring role in the Guardian’s Food fraud and counterfeit cotton: the detectives untangling the global supply chain. Science nerds, IPR types and trade nuts alike will enjoy this one, which looks at the quest to prove authenticity “at the atomic level.”

A flurry of weekend career advice from a certain salmon-coloured paper that we think many of you would enjoy:

• Ted Lasso’s leadership lessons (please don’t talk to us about season 2 — we’re waiting for our next block of days off to binge on it)
• CSR careers finally come of age — and are breaking sector boundaries
• Why do businesses keep trying to find a ‘magic’ playbook? wherein a tech investor argues that “companies should be data-centric from day one and write their own script as they look to scale up.”

???? ON THE TUBE TONIGHT-

(all times CLT)

The Korean thriller taking the world by storm: Squid Game has been trending on Netflix here in Egypt for the past few days, with the show proving a breakaway hit without any major marketing. The premise is simple. A number of cash-strapped individuals are offered a huge payment by a mysterious organization, granted that they compete in a series of children’s games. The hundreds of participants soon realize that the games have a fatal twist and it’s a matter of ‘kill or be killed’. The violence-ridden TV show deciphers human nature and capitalism by using the microcosm of each game to explore a theme such as greed, compassion, and desperation.

There’s no shortage of reviews out about the show: CNet | LA Times | The Guardian | Polygon.

⚽ Our new Portuguese Coach Carlos Queiroz makes his first appearance tonight during a friendly between the Egyptian national team and Liberia at 9 pm.

Matches to look out for tonight in the Europa League: Real Sociedad take on Mónaco, Legia Warsaw go up against Leicester City, and Naples kicked off against Spartak Moscow, all at 6:45 pm.

Serie A, La Liga, Bundesliga, and Ligue 1 are all starting new matchweeks tomorrow: The Spanish League will start with Atlético Bilbao versus Deportivo Alavés at 9 pm, the Italian with Cagliari versus Venice at 8:45 pm, the German with Köln taking on Grouter Fürth at 8:30 pm, and the French with Lance against Reims Stadium at 9 pm.

And Premier League’s Super Saturday kicks off on Saturday with six matches: Manchester United is playing against Everton at 1:30pm, before 4pm gets extra busy with Chelsea versus Southampton, Burnley versus Norwich City, Leeds versus Watford, and Wolverhampton versus Newcastle. The day will end with Brighton playing against Arsenal at 6:30pm — the latter of which has been doing surprisingly well these days.

More matches you shouldn’t miss on Saturday: In La Liga, Atletico Madrid and Barcelona will hit the field at 9 pm, while Borussia Dortmund will compete with Augsburg in the German Bundesliga at 3:30 pm. Serie A has Turin against fan-favorite Juventus at 6pm and Sassuolo against Inter Milan at 8:45pm.

???? EAT THIS TONIGHT-

It’s all in the details at Korba’s Charlie’s: You eat with your eyes first and Charlie’s will make sure that you’re a satisfied customer before you put anything in your mouth. Inspired by the Heliopolis of the mid-1900s, it’s all about aesthetics at the Korba restaurant from the huge, green, tree-like lights scattered throughout to the very cool spoons that caught our eye. The food continues the trend of gorgeousness, with each plate being lowered on the table looking better than the next. The menu is diverse and will have something for everyone. We loved their salmon avocado salad, paella, roasted beef tenderloin, and creamy beef penne. However, the thing that truly captured our heart is their desserts, especially their eton mess.

???? OUT AND ABOUT-

(all times CLT)

Sony Middle East is bringing documentary photographer and filmmaker Mohamed Mahdy to Consoleya for a talk titled The narrative components of different kinds of visual storytelling. The talk will take place tonight at 7 pm at the Downtown coworking space.

Marwan Pablo’s comeback concert is taking place tomorrow at Al Manara Arena. Joining the trap artist are Shabjdeed, Al Nather, and Daboor. You can buy tickets from TicketsMarche.

Zayed’s Park St. has organized three days of art and music at the new complex, kicking off today and running until Saturday. The lineup includes exhibitions, music performances, graffiti workshops, and more.

Maadi’s Place Des Arts is hosting Villa Bazaar tomorrow starting from 10am, bringing together local fashion and textile brands.

Cairotronica’s Algorithmic Perfumery has been extended to 18 October. We’ve visited the exhibition personally and couldn’t recommend it more. Our three customized perfumes have since become a constant fixture in our routine for getting ready.

???? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

Businesses can thrive by fixing the world’s problems instead of creating them: Unilever CEO Paul Polman and sustainable business guru Andrew Winston teamed up to create Net Positive, a book that highlights the responsibility the global business community has to our collective humanity and planet. From climate change to rampant inequality, a bottom-up approach must be taken to begin to tackle these issues and finally move past them. That starts with companies becoming net positive and giving more than they take. The key argument in the book is that this will actually make firms more profitable than the alternative, by embracing cooperation with governments, focusing on ESG, and evolving a new culture at the workplace. The book aims to inspire a movement where CEOs, politicians, and activists can together reset the world’s trajectory, believes renowned climate-change author Paul Hawken.

NEED TO ADD TO YOUR TBR PILE this weekend? Go check out the short list for the 2021 Financial Times business book of the year. The finalists from the long list of 15 titles are as follows, with Amazon links for your convenience:

• The World for Sale — How a group of international commodity trading houses rode the commodity boom.
• Empire of Pain — the rise and fall of Purdue, the company widely blamed for America’s opioid crisis
• The Conversation — “how to turn difficult discussions about race, at work and in society in general, into a meaningful promotion of change and racial justice”
• The New Climate War — “a polemic against climate ‘inactivists’” that also “lays out systemic measures” to fight climate change.
• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends — on the “arms race between cyber criminals, spies and hackers”
• The Aristocracy of Talent — on the backlash against meritocracy and the idea that we should embrace competition according to talent.

The EGX30 rose 1.2% at today’s close on turnover of EGP 906 mn (42.6% below the 90-day average). Local investors were net sellers. The index is down 3.0% YTD.

In the green: Raya Holding (+6.8%), Orascom Development Egypt (+4.8%) and AMOC (+3.8%).

In the red: Egypt Kuwait Holding-EGP (-0.9%), Mopco (-0.6%) and Abou Kir Fertilizers (-0.5%).

Fancy a trip to the metaverse? Imagine a new world, complete with land, buildings, goods, and avatars who use currencies to trade them — all of it virtual. That future is being brought closer to fruition by companies using virtual-reality (VR) and augmented-reality (AR) technology to allow their users to enter the “metaverse,” a catch-all term for ventures from virtual workspaces to gaming platforms, where A In these metaverses, blockchain technology including cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) allow users to accumulate unique assets, whose value — just like in The Real World — is determined by demand.

The next digital frontier: First coined by American writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the metaverse has been a Silicon Valley buzzword for years. But as the pandemic swiftly brought more aspects of work and leisure into the online sphere, interest in the metaverse’s potential — and how to monetize it — has ramped up. Facebook founder and controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg has set a timeline for the social media giant’s domination of the virtual territory: the company “will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company” in the next five years, he told The Verge this summer, adding that “You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet.”

Facebook’s maximalist Zoom: In August, Facebook invited journalists to visit the first iteration of its metaverse at a press conference run through its new app Horizon Workrooms, which is currently in an “open beta” testing stage. Workrooms is accessed through the Oculus VR headset, which is (not coincidentally) also owned by Facebook. It allows colleagues to meet around a virtual conference table in the form of “legless avatars” or call in to the meeting room via video conference. Workrooms is just a first glimpse of a suite of VR services to be rolled out by Horizon, with Facebook global affairs head Nick Clegg laying out the company’s plans to remodel reality in a “Journey to the Metaverse” talk earlier this week.

Saying the right things: Clegg was keen to stress how responsible and “thoughtful” the company plans to be as it develops the technology. "It's almost the opposite of that now long-abandoned slogan of 'move fast and break things,'" he told Axios. The company’s accompanying statement hit all the right discursive beats, too, emphasizing the extent to which the company values “privacy,” “inclusion” and “safety.”

New universe, same problems: The irony of this statement will probably not be lost on those with even a cursory understanding of Facebook’s chequered history. Researchers note that concerns over transparency, data privacy, gender and racial discrimination, inclusion, and harm to children in the online sphere will only be amplified within the virtual space. “For me, it seems like it is simply another step in the monetisation of data to the benefit of Facebook and other large platforms sold to people as fun, exciting, helpful for productivity at work and so on,” said LSE new media and internet professor Robin Mansell. Others marvel at the audacity of launching into a whole new realm of unregulated tech innovations at a time when Facebook is facing a crackdown from US regulators, who have been appalled both by the firm’s sheer power and by allegations that it causes harm to users. And if we can’t get big tech to pay their fair share on income made in this realm, good luck trying to tax their meta-earnings.

It’s Zuckerberg’s world, and we’ll just live in it: Indications so far are that Horizon, which remains in invite-only beta testing despite an original 2020 launch date, represents Facebook’s best hope to build and control the underlying infrastructure of The One and Only Metaverse, with developers creating their own products and experiences inside the space. “This isn’t just a product that we’re building. It needs to be an ecosystem,” said Zuckerberg. The potential of a single dominant virtual marketplace, where people can create, buy and sell interoperable digital goods and services from many developers, is much greater than that of a space that only Facebook users can access and where only the company’s products are on offer: “You have your avatar and your digital goods, and you want to be able to teleport anywhere. You don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s stuff,” he said.

But ecosystems are hard to control: Some say, the idealistic metaverse is anathema to the way Facebook operates. “Everything Facebook does is inside a closed experience controlled by their engineers and admins,” writes Jerod Venema, CEO of real-time communications firm LiveSwitch, adding that the company may hope to restrict metaverse access to users in order to mine and manage their data on an exclusive basis. “Facebook’s ethos of top-down control is the exact opposite of what a thriving metaverse needs.”

If it all sounds a little dystopian, that’s because it is: Social media companies have had difficulties making the 2D digital world a pleasant place to hang out. We may want to think twice before letting them scale it up. Speaking to the Guardian, NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway (whose twice-weekly podcast with the inimitable Kara Swisher is killer) said that people are scared of the looming “Zuckerverse” — and rightly so. “The notion that he’s decided that the only way to increase our attention is to become the universe is one of those problems when you sit back and ponder on it too long, it feels like it could go nowhere good,” he said.

14-30 September (Tuesday-Thursday): 76th session of the UN General Assembly, New York.

30 September-2 October (Thursday-Saturday): Egypt Projects 2021 expo, Egypt International Exhibition Center, Cairo, Egypt.

30 September-8 October (Thursday-Friday): The Cairo International Fair, Cairo International Conference Center, Cairo, Egypt.

30 September (Thursday): Winter opening hours for shops and restaurants begins.

30 September: Closing of 2021’s first oil and gas tender in the Gulf of Suez, Western Desert, and the Mediterranean.

30 September (Thursday): First tranche of overdue subsidy payouts will be handed to eligible exporters.

30 September (Thursday): Direct flights between Egypt and three Libyan airports resume.

October: Romanian President Klaus Iohannis could visit Egypt in mid this month to discuss ways to boost tourism cooperation between the two countries.

1 October (Friday): Businesses importing goods at seaports will need to file shipping documents and cargo data digitally to the Advance Cargo Information (ACI) system.

1 October (Friday): Expo 2020 Dubai opens.

1 October (Friday): Deadline for state-owned companies and government agencies to sign up to e-invoicing platform.

2 October (Saturday): House returns from recess; new legislative session begins.

5 October (Tuesday): Senate returns from recess; new legislative session begins.

6 October (Wednesday): Armed Forces Day.

7 October (Thursday): National holiday in observance of Armed Forces Day.

9 October (Saturday): Public schools begin 2021-2022 academic year

11-17 October (Monday-Sunday): IMF + World Bank Annual Meetings.

12-14 October (Tuesday-Thursday): Mediterranean Offshore Conference, Alexandria, Egypt.

18 October (Monday): Prophet’s Birthday.

21 October (Thursday): National holiday in observance of the Prophet’s Birthday.

24-28 October (Sunday-Thursday) Cairo Water Week, Cairo, Egypt.

27-28 October (Wednesday-Thursday) Intelligent Cities Exhibition & Conference, Royal Maxim Palace Kempinski, Cairo, Egypt.

28 October (Thursday): The CBE’s Monetary Policy Committee will meet to review interest rates.

28 October (Thursday): Second tranche of overdue subsidy payouts will be handed to eligible exporters.

30 October – 4 November (Saturday-Thursday): The first edition of Race The Legends, Egypt.

November: The French-Egyptian Business Forum is set to take place in the Suez Canal Economic Zone.

November: Egypt will host another round of talks to reach a potential Egyptian-Eurasian trade agreement, which can significantly contribute to increasing the volume of Egyptian exports to the Russia-led bloc that includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

1-3 November (Monday-Wednesday): Egypt Energy exhibition on power and renewable energy, Egypt International Exhibition Center, Cairo, Egypt.

2-3 November (Tuesday-Wednesday): The Federal Reserve meets to review interest rates.

1-12 November (Monday-Friday): 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), Glasgow, United Kingdom.

16-17 November (Tuesday-Wednesday): Africa fintech summit, Cairo.

26 November-5 December (Friday-Sunday): The 43rd Cairo International Film Festival.

29 November-2 December (Monday-Thursday): Egypt Defense Expo, Egypt International Exhibition Centre.

7-8 December (Tuesday-Wednesday): North Africa Trade Finance Summit.

8-10 December (Wednesday-Thursday): Global Forum for Higher Education and Scientific Research (GFHS), Cairo, Egypt.

12-14 December (Sunday-Tuesday): Food Africa Cairo trade exhibition, Egypt International Exhibition Center, Cairo, Egypt.

13-17 December: United Nations Convention against Corruption, Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

14-19 December (Tuesday-Sunday): The Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater.

14-15 December (Tuesday-Wednesday): The Federal Reserve meets to review interest rates.

15 December (Wednesday): Deadline for joint stock companies and investment companies in Cairo to join e-invoicing platform.

16 December (Thursday): The CBE’s Monetary Policy Committee will meet to review interest rates.

1Q2022: Launch of the Egyptian Commodities Exchange.

14-16 February 2022 (Monday-Wednesday): Egypt Petroleum Show, Egypt International Exhibition Center, New Cairo, Egypt.

1H2022: The World Economic Forum annual meeting, location TBD.

22-24 April 2022: World Bank-IMF spring meeting, Washington D.C.

May 2022: Investment in Logistics Conference, Cairo, Egypt

16 June 2022 (Thursday): End of 2021-2022 academic year for public schools

27 June-3 July 2022 (Monday-Sunday): World University Squash Championships, New Giza.

2H2022: IEF-IGU Ministerial Gas Forum, Egypt. Date + location TBA.

**Note to readers: Some national holidays may appear twice above. Since 2020, Egypt has observed most mid-week holidays on Thursdays regardless of the day on which they fall and may also move those days to Sundays. We distinguish below between the actual holiday and its observance.