Egypt's stock exchange starts off 2019 on wrong foot
After a punishing 2018, Egypt’s stock exchange started 2019 on a downward path amid fears of repercussions from the US-China trade war and the emerging markets crisis.
CAIRO — The Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX) has been incurring severe losses in 2019, as the Jan. 17 session closed down 3.5 billion Egyptian pounds (around $195 million).
On Dec. 22, several newspapers reported that net transactions on the EGX also revealed heavy losses during 2018, with a market capitalization drop of around 80 billion Egyptian pounds ($4.5 billion), or about 9.7% of the exchange's total market capital of 825 billion pounds ($46 billion) as of December 2017.
However, for the fiscal year that ended in June 2018, Egypt achieved a growth rate of 5.4%, the highest in 10 years, according to Minister of Planning Hala Saeed.
At a Jan. 3 press conference on calendar-year 2018 stock market performance, EGX head Mohamed Farid did not address losses. Instead, he boasted about the exchange's achievements, pointing to four initial public offerings with a combined value of 5.2 billion pounds ($290.5 million) in the first nine months of 2018 and to 24,000 new EGX investors.
