Sisi calls for addressing issues of factories, industrial sector

CAIRO – 8 January 2018: President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi called for more attention to the issues of insolvent factories and the creation of effective methods to resolve this issue.
Sisi made the statements during the inauguration of a number of projects in the 10th of Ramadan City.

Responding to the call, Minister of Industry and Foreign Trade Tarek Kabil said that there are 135 stalled factories, where 66 of them re-entered operations in the previous months.

Around 960 factories were reported by the Ministry of Industry to have gone bankrupt in 2014, after the financial issues they endured following the 2011 revolution.

Talking about the current projects to revitalize the sector, Kabil noted that a number of 13 industrial complexes are currently under construction in 12 governorates, totaling to 4,436 factories at the cost of LE 5.4 billion.

"The Industry Ministry issued 28.5 million square meters of industrial land plots, where 2 million meters of them were issued at no cost for 567 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Upper Egypt," Kabil said, explaining that the government invested LE 6.8 billion in these projects.

“We hired private-sector developers to work on developing other industrial complexes, and they successfully developed 12 areas, including 983 factories, at the cost of LE 24.5 billion,” the minister added.