The Finance Ministry will launch a fourth phase of its export subsidy program at the start of November, Finance Minister Mohamed Maait said in a statement on Thursday. The program allows exporters to receive overdue subsidies in a single payment rather than in installments over four to five years, in return for a 15% haircut.

Some 2.5k exporters have received a combined EGP 30 bn in overdue subsidies since the program launched in November last year, Maait said. Vice Minister of Finance Ahmed Kouchouk earlier this month told us that the government had paid out some EGP 23 bn in overdue export subsidies to date.

The fourth and final phase? The current export subsidy system is set to be replaced by a new program greenlit by the cabinet in June that will see the government dole out EGP 8 bn in subsidies this fiscal year, Kouchouk told us. The new system will focus more closely on “the performance of exporters” — and introduce a sliding scale of incentives that become larger as an exporter’s use of local components increases, he added.