Our friends at BTECH, the home and consumer electronics retailer, opened store number 143 yesterday, cutting the ribbon on the >3k sqm, EGP 32 mn “megastore” on Port Said St. in Alexandria’s Sidi Gaber neighborhood. The opening (pdf) gives the retailer, backed by UK-based private equity firm DPI, 15 stores in Alexandria and another five across the North Coast.

“We have 10 more stores to open before the end of the year,” CEO Mahmoud Khattab told us yesterday. “Whatever the macroeconomic headwinds, we’re opening a new store every 10 days — and creating new jobs as we do so. The current challenges will end, and we need to be ready to capture the upside when it does.”

This is the seventeenth store BTECH has opened in partnership with the Holding Company for Tourism and Hotels, turning a shop owned by the state institution into a modern retail outlet. “We have invested more than EGP 180 mn alongside the Holding Company since we started working with them more than six years ago,” Khattab said. “It’s a great example of public-private cooperation.”

The new Alex megastore includes BTECH’s first in-store zone solely for its B2B line of business. “We’re well known for our consumer facing business, but business-to-business is increasingly important to us,” Khattab said, adding that the store will also have a hands-on after sales service area to help shoppers set up or troubleshoot purchases. BTECH figures the new store will see footfall in the range of 35k shoppers per month.

CORRECTION- An earlier version of this story incorrectly said this is the sixteenth store BTECH has opened with the Holding Company for Tourism and Hotels.