Is Egypt really recovering from the pandemic?
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- First of all, regards our COVID watch we need to ask ourselves, Is Egypt really recovering from the pandemic? The recovery from isolation hospitals has reached 74.1%. We believe this statistic may be deceiving because many who have COVID are not tested and most likely stay at home rather than in hospitals. However, vaccine rollout is on the rise, Egypt is going to get 40 million doses from Covax and U.S. is in the talk of donating vaccines. This is good news for Egypt’s economy as more people can partake in the economy.
- Moving to our M&A talks, a consortium of Tawasol Holdings and LimeVest affiliate Maternity and Pediatrics Holding has made its move in the race for Alexandria Medical Services, submitting a bid that values the company at more than EGP 740 mn. The companies have submitted a request to go ahead with a mandatory tender offer (MTO) to acquire a 74.08% stake in the company at EGP 52 per share. This is higher than the bid submitted by Tana Africa’s TAT Medical Services, which bid for Alex Medical at EGP 49.04 per share earlier this month, up from the EGP 45.53 it had offered in May.
- Moreover, in other M&A news, Hong Kong’s Zeta Investments has raised its MTO for 90% of Alexandria National Company for Financial Investments (ANFI), to EGP 6 apiece, up from the EGP 5.48 per share it submitted in mid-June. The new offer values ANFI at EGP 31.35 mn. Noting that the revised offer comes one day after private equity firm Compass Capital has submitted an MTO to acquire up to 100% of ANFI for EGP 5.72 per share. Tycoon Holding wants to acquire a 90% stake for EGP 5.60 per share.
- You may also don’t want to miss, the global macro updates: Solar falls victim to inflation pressures which means that inflation could hit the global solar energy: After the industry has tried and succeeded for decades in bringing the cost of solar down, the global commodities boom could throw a wrench at the whole endeavor. It is worthy to mention that we could notice an increase of 12% in the cost of new solar installations this year on the back of fast-increasing steel and polysilicon prices and higher freight costs.
- This will lead us to say that your laptops and tablets are going to get more expensive: It appears that consumer electronics manufacturers have begun passing the increased costs from the global chip shortage down to the consumer, with Dell, HP, Asus, and Amazon reporting price increases on their upcoming models between 6-20%. These run the gamut of smartphones, tablets, all the way to printers. This comes as the prices of components have risen between 15-40%.
- For our no end diplomacy GERD dispute, Egypt Irrigation Minister met with South Sudan’s foreign minister to discuss GERD disputes. This is a result of Ethiopia ignoring Egypt’s and Sudan’s objections, and continuing with the second filing of the dam. Tensions between Ethiopia and Egypt have been rising, last week Egypt sent a letter to the UN council to look further into the dispute.
- Finally, for our startup talks, it is worthy to highlight that the Egyptian digital trucking platform Trella closed a USD 42 mn funding round co-led by Maersk Growth, the venture capital arm of container shipping giant Maersk. The financing includes USD 30 mn new equity and USD 12 mn debt facilities, to scale its operations in the MENAP region. We could say that with this vast financing, the company’s ambition is to become an Egyptian unicorn with a value of over USD 1 bn.
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