Egypt opened a new international airport on the outskirts of the capital on Saturday for an initial trial period, in a bid to ease pressure from Cairo’s main airport and help boost tourism.



The Sphinx International Airport, located near the Giza Pyramids and the new Grand Egyptian Museum, is expected to operate 30 flights by early February during its trial run.



The $17 million project comes as part of the Tourism Ministry’s plan to improve accessibility to historical sites from resort areas on the Red sea like Sharm el Sheikh and Hurghada. It will fully open in 2020.



The bombing of a Russian airliner shortly after it took off from Sharm el Sheikh in 2015 hit tourism numbers hard, continuing a downward trend that started with the years of turmoil following the “Arab Spring” protests of 2011.



Tourism revenues had begun to rebound, jumping 77 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2018 to $4.8 billion, before a deadly attack on a bus in December killed three Vietnamese tourists and their Egyptian guide.



The bus attack was the first deadly attack against foreign tourists in Egypt for over a year. -Reuters



&#8211; Mohamed Zaki

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Egypt Opens New International Airport in Giza for Trial Flights

The annual Cairo International Book Fair opened this week in a shiny new venue far away, literally and metaphorically, from the city’s historic book souk &#8211; and many of the old market’s merchants stayed away. 



Marking the prestige of the event, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi inaugurated the fair’s 50th edition at the Egypt International Exhibition Centre in the affluent New Cairo area on the outskirts of the capital.



Back downtown, among the teetering stacks of mostly second hand tomes at Azbakeya, a book market that dates back more than a century, merchants complained they had been sidelined.



Dozens of them used to exhibit at the fair’s former home in Nasr City, a district easily accessed, including by metro. This year only six were allowed to sell books at the fair after agreeing to stringent conditions.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">“We did not cancel the Azbakeya wall, but we set a booklet of conditions to participate in the fair which all publishers committed to,” said Haitham al-Haj, head of the General Authority for Books, which organizes the event.</blockquote>



Authorities are keen to prevent the sale of counterfeit books, which were rampant in the Azbakeya section of the fair last year, including best-sellers such as Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”.



Also at issue for the Azbakeya merchants was the cost &#8211; around 1,200 Egyptian pounds ($67) &#8211; of participating, and rules on how they must display their books &#8211; stacking them up in high, disorderly piles is no longer acceptable.



“When people are selling old used books, they have a thousand titles rather than one, so, they are unable to display them in any other way, unlike a publisher. A publisher has probably a hundred titles,” said Harby Hassan, a 63-year-old Azbakeya bookseller.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="594" height="395" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/gettyimages-1083379846-594x594.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-38827" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/gettyimages-1083379846-594x594.jpg 594w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/gettyimages-1083379846-594x594-300x199.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 594px) 100vw, 594px" /><figcaption>A woman asks a book vendor for information in Cairo&#8217;s historic al-Azbakeya book market at downtown in Cairo on January 16, 2019. (Photo by Mohamed el-Shahed / AFP) (Photo credit should read MOHAMED EL-SHAHED/AFP/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>



The Azbakeya merchants announced their own month-long book fair from Jan. 15, competing with the international event that runs from Jan. 23 to Feb. 5.



Attendance at both was sizeable.



&#8216;Fifty Shades&#8217; author is back with a new title



Customers flocked to New Cairo to avoid the crowds and squeeze of downtown, while others preferred Azbakeya for its highly competitive prices. -Reuters



-Sayed Sheasha, Mohamed Abdel Ghany and Yousef Saba

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Cairo Book Fair’s Gleaming New Site Opens Far From Historic Market

It was the strangest tournament that Warren Bond ever played in. He was in Egypt, playing for South Africa, against four of the world’s hockey nations. Their hosts had put them up in a military hotel; outside Bond’s window was a parked fighter jet. Every now and again a tank rumbled past. A police escort took them to the stadium.
Their matches were just as daunting. The stadium in Cairo was empty but for a small bunch of men in suits and ties including Hosni Mubarak, being a big hockey fan, says Bond.
When the final game came, Bond but his fellow South Africans could see nothing but angry soldiers.
“We got to the stadium thinking it was going to be completely empty but it was full. Every spectator was in military uniform. It was quite intimidating. They had been given instructions that whenever an Egyptian got the ball they went mad and the crowd would be silent when we had the ball. You couldn’t script it,” says Bond.
The silence was deafening as South Africa scored the winning goal. As the ball hit the net a sublime moment turned bizarre when Gregg Clark celebrated.
“I won’t show you what he did, but basically he ran along the sidelines abusing and shouting at all the spectators. We were shouting ‘Clarky they’re the army, they’re lethal, they’ve got guns. What the hell are you doing?’” he says.
Bond remembers Clark’s victory dance before the Egyptian army like it was yesterday. He last played for South Africa in 2003 where he clocked up 64 caps, five of them as captain.
Few hockey players these days can say they have beaten Australia twice and been to the Commonwealth Games, but Bond can. He was even supposed to have gone to the 2000 Sydney Olympics until the National Olympic Committee of South Africa pulled the side three months before the event, saying there were not enough players of color.
Then in March, he got the call. His country needed him again. He was called to play for the South African Masters side, a team for those that are 40 years and above. They needed him to brush the dust off his boots and play in the FIH Masters World Cup in The Hague, Netherlands.
“It used to be you would be called up to a squad, then you would go to national camp and at the end of it you would wait, praying for your name to called out by the selectors. If they did, you would go and play for South Africa. Now, your mates call you up and say ‘hey, you’ve been selected to play for South Africa for your age-group’. And you’re like ‘well how did I get selected?’ and they say ‘no we just decided that it would be cool if you joined the team,’” says Bond.
In the 10 year gap between internationals, Bond had not been idle. He has completed the Comrades Marathon twice, a grueling 89-kilometer road race between Pietermaritzburg and Durban in Kwa-Zulu Natal.
South African hockey players have to work. It simply doesn’t pay. When he was in his heydays as an international player, Bond worked as a chartered accountant. He also founded Sport For All, a franchise operation which has 15 sports coaching businesses running in South African townships. On the business side he invested in Luminous, a banking innovations technology company which revolutionized online accounting with First National Bank (FNB).
“One of my partners got tired of capturing bank statements and recapturing the same data later on. We thought this made no sense, there had to be a smarter way, so why not get the banks to do this? We invested in it and landed up with FNB as a customer,” he says.
Bond also created an innovation matchmaking site, called Matchi. It helps connect entrepreneurs with banks.
“I’ve seen it. People can spend two years talking to the wrong people at a bank, spending millions and millions of rands.”
It’s a sign of his outdoor life that the idea was born nowhere near an office or a bank, but on a river to Mandalay in the jungles of Burma. Another entrepreneurial venture was born while hiking the Himalayas below Mount Everest.
“It’s minus 15 degrees outside and you have your piece of chipboard and your little mattress. You wake up and everything is frozen, it’s an amazing place for ideas.”
From the road to Mandalay to a small piece of astroturf in the Johannesburg winter where aging hockey stars play. Bond takes to hockey like a fish returning to water. For a moment it could be Cairo in 2000, instead it’ll be in The Hague in 2014 when he pops off a few skilful moves with his dusty old stick.
“I am not too worried about the fitness; I am a bit worried about converting it to the sprinting which is a different ball game,” he quips.
“It’s a bunch of mates you see once a year. What’s more you get to compete against some of the people you played against internationally, under more relaxed circumstances. It’s different at Masters. You are going there knowing you will have a few beers with them after them game. You couldn’t have too many of those when you were in the middle of a series against Australia,” says Bond.
His return to hockey will be less daunting. This time, Bond won’t be in the middle of stadium of mean sounding soldiers.

‘They’ve Got Guns,  What The Hell Are You Doing?’

Over the past two years, Egypt has undergone a significant transformation, not only politically but also economically. The protests in Cairo’s downtown Tahrir Square, in January 2011, have had a wide-ranging impact not only on the country’s political composition, but also on its short- and medium-term economic performance. While the ups and downs since the revolution have been palpable, the downs obviously more so; the long-term fundamentals of Egypt remain just as appealing as they were in the years leading up to former President Mubarak’s ousting. Provided investors are willing to ride out the immediate uncertainty, the prospects for growth are encouraging.
In the pre-crisis days of 2007 and 2008, Egypt was racking up GDP growth in excess of 7% and services like telecommunications were growing by double digits annually; tourism jumped up by as much as 21% in one year. The country’s stock market, one of the continent’s largest both in terms of listed firms and capitalization, attracted significant inflows from foreign institutional investors, while the banking sector—leaner and meaner after several years of consolidation and robust regulation—saw a drop in non-performing loans and an increase in profitability.
But the combination of falling global demand, together with revolutionary instability, meant that GDP growth last year fell to 1.8%. Growth in 2012  was only slightly better, at 2%, while forecasts for 2013 are at a solid but lower-than-needed 3%. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) fell by more than $10 billion in 2011 and key sectors, like tourism, have slumped, contracting by nearly 6% over the most recent fiscal year. Industrial action has depressed manufacturing output in labor-intensive sectors even as official unemployment has risen to 12%, not counting the vast ranks of the underemployed.
Egypt faces problems that have been exacerbated by the revolution—including some very pressing long-term political questions, ranging from the creation of a new constitution to improving institutional trust—but among the more urgent challenges is the lack of inclusive growth. The subsidy debate highlights this most acutely. Government grants and social benefits made up roughly one-third of total expenditure in the 2011/12 fiscal year, which runs from June to June, according to the ministry of finance. Reducing the burden is a priority for President Mohamed Morsi’s new government, yet reforming subsidies carries not only significant political risk but also fails to alleviate the pressure on the most vulnerable portions of the population. As a result, steps have been tentative at best. The focus has been primarily on energy subsidies and the most recent version of the 2012/13 budget from May 2012 sought a reduction in fuel subsidies by some 27%, with consumption-intensive industries seeing the most significant increase in costs. Food subsidies have been left untouched.
The country is also grappling with an increasingly hollow labor structure, which exacerbates income inequality. Figures from Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) show that unemployment among university graduates reached 18.9% in 2010 and a similar study in 2012 revealed that demand for high- and low-skilled workers is outstripping that for middle-skilled employees, dampening social mobility and constraining opportunities for the middle class.
However, for a short period there was a steady stream of more encouraging news, which while not exactly pointing to a full-fledged recovery, hinted at a more hopeful outlook. Growth forecasts for 2013 were pegged at 3%, still far lower than what is needed but nonetheless comparatively robust. Headline inflation, which reached as high as 18% in the pre-crisis years, dropped to a far more manageable 5.4% in August. Similarly, yields on a number of Egyptian bonds had eased to some of their lowest levels in nearly a year in September when the country hawked its first floating-rate bonds. Around roughly the same time, Moody’s reaffirmed its B2 rating for Egyptian sovereign bonds, due in part to an improving political outlook, along with a more stable external payments position, stronger macroeconomic conditions and a restart of International Monterary Fund (IMF) negotiations—all of which spelled good news for the government.
By the end of the year, however, things began to look rocky again, with the pound dropping precipitously, from 6.05 to the dollar to 6.30 to the dollar. Deficit estimates from the current     fiscal year, ending in June, may hit up to 10% of GDP. Combined with continuing political instability in the wake of protests over the constitutional referendum, the spate of worsening indicators is far from encouraging for Egypt’s policymakers.
The IMF loan, which could be worth up to $4.8 billion, is particularly important in terms of strengthening investor confidence, which has been hit hard not only by the broader uncertainty but also by regulatory hiccups and governance scandals, particularly in sectors such as real estate and construction. However, with one of the most attractive price-earnings ratios in the region, Egypt’s firms remain extremely attractive on a value basis and the country’s stock market has rebounded by more than 37% in recent months.
There is still potential for a turnaround for the country’s economy, but if this momentum is to be sustained in the years to come, Egypt will need to better leverage its competitive advantages. Crucially, Egypt benefits from both strong export ties and a vast consumer population, which provides firms with access to large domestic and foreign markets. In spite of rising subsidies and wages, the country is nonetheless extremely competitive as a manufacturing destination. Furthermore, significant upstream gas reserves have the ability to provide feedstock not only for Africa’s largest refining sector but also for the rapidly-growing electricity segment, which is racing to keep up with annual demand growth of 7%.
It is difficult to understate the impact of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, given the economic ramifications of the massive political changes the country has undergone. The past two years have been turbulent but if the country can better exploit its healthy long-term fundamentals, a return to robust growth is virtually assured.

Tag: Cairo

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Egypt Opens New International Airport in Giza for Trial Flights

Cairo Book Fair’s Gleaming New Site Opens Far From Historic Market

‘They’ve Got Guns, What The Hell Are You Doing?’

Egypt Rising