Prices of home appliances expected to rise following a climb in input prices

Cairo – December 19, 2023: Prices of home appliances are expected to jump in the new year following an increase in input prices for companies manufacturing electrical appliances in Egypt. Factories manufacturing in Egypt are facing a surge in steel prices, with the most recent increase by Ezz Dekheila Steel Company (Ezz Steel) earlier this week.

The steel producer upped its prices of hot-rolled sheet metal to reach around LE 40,000 per ton, according to Mohamed Hanafi, Executive Director of the Chamber of Metallurgical Industries in the Federation of Industries.

Manufacturers usually increase their prices according to the prices of input (materials required for production), explained Hassan Mabrouk, head of the Electrical Appliances Division at the Chamber of Engineering Industries (CEI), to Al Borsa on Monday.

Companies within the home appliance sector’s companies will adjust their prices after calculating the new sheet metal prices in proportion to the required amount for manufacturing of each appliance, he added.

The new prices are expected to appear in the market at the start of 2024, as companies continue operations using their current inventory.

Throughout the year, multiple of Egypt’s steel producers have raised their prices, according to the Cairo Chamber of Commerce's Building Materials Division in an earlier release.

Ezz Steel previously raised its prices in March to around LE 37,300 per ton, while El-Marakby Steel upped its prices to about LE 33,500 per ton earlier this year, it explained. Egyptian Steel bumped prices to LE 35,000, followed by Garhy Steel with a new price of LE 33,500 per ton.

Fitch Solutions ranked Egypt as Africa’s largest steel producer in 2022, having produced around 9.8 million tons of steel that year, and placed the country as the second largest in the MENA region.

Egypt’s engineering exports surged by 22 percent in October 2023 to reach $396 million, according to a December report by the Engineering Export Council of Egypt (EECE), with the household appliance sector exports rising by 1.9 percent to be the second primary export sector.