page_title: Economy of Egypt
section_title: ICT sector
hierarchical_section_title: Economy of Egypt / Emerging sectors / ICT sector
caption_attribution_description: English: Landscape
context_page_description: The economy of Egypt was a highly centralized economy focused on import substitution under president Gamal Abd EL-Nasser. In the 1990s, a series of International Monetary Fund arrangements, coupled with massive external debt relief resulting from Egypt's participation in the Gulf War coalition, helped Egypt improve its macroeconomic performance.
  Since 2000, the pace of structural reforms, including fiscal, monetary policies, taxation, privatisation and new business legislations, helped Egypt move towards a more market-oriented economy and prompted increased foreign investment. The reforms and policies have strengthened macroeconomic annual growth results which averaged 8% annually between 2004 and 2009 but the government largely failed to equitably share the wealth and the benefits of growth have failed to trickle down to improve economic conditions for the broader population, especially with the growing problem of unemployment and underemployment.
context_section_description: The Egyptian information and communications technology sector has been growing significantly since it was separated from the transportation sector. The market for telecommunications market was officially deregulated since the beginning of 2006 according to the WTO agreement.
  The government established ITIDA through Law 15 of the year 2004 as governmental entity. This agency aims at paving the way for the diffusion of the e-business services in Egypt capitalizing on different mandates of the authority as activating the Egyptian e-signature law and supporting an export-oriented IT sector in Egypt.
  While the move could open the market for new entrants, add and improve the infrastructure for its network, and in general create a competitive market, the fixed line market is de facto monopolized by Telecom Egypt.
  The cellular phone market was a duopoly with prices artificially high but witnessed in the past couple of years the traditional price war between the incumbents Mobinil and Vodafone. A 500 minutes outbound local and long-distance calling plan currently costs approximately US$30 as compared to approximately US$90 in 2005. While the current price is not so expensive, it is still above the international price as plans never allow "unlimited night & weekend minutes."
  A third GSM 3.5G license was awarded in April 2006 for US$3 billion to a consortium led by the UAE company Eitesalat (66%), Egypt Post (20%), the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) (10%), and the NBE's Commercial International Bank (4%), thus moving the market from duopoly to oligopoly.
  On 24 September 2006, the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA) announced a license award to Egyptian-Arab private sector consortium of companies to extend a maritime cable for international traffic. The US$120 million cable project will serve the Gulf region and south Europe. The construction of the cable should decrease the currently high international call costs and increase domestic demand on internet broadband services, in importantly increase exports of international telecommunication services of Egyptian companies, mostly in the Smart Village.
  It is expected that NTRA will award two licenses for international gateways using open technology and deploy WiMax technology enabling the delivery of last-mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to ADSL.
  The main barrier to growth for Egypt's ICT sector is the monopoly of telecommunication corporations and quarreling workforce.
caption: Smart Village, a business district in 6th of October (city) established in 2001 to facilitate the growth of high-tech businesses.
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D80", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:01:11 00:41:51", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "228", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "978", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8127", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/100", "EXIF FNumber": "28/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Aperture Priority", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2009:01:04 22:40:13", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2009:01:04 22:40:13", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "37/10", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "20", "EXIF SubSecTime": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3872", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2592", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "852", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 1, 2, 0, 1]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "30", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Hard", "EXIF Sharpness": "Hard", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}