ITIDA: The proven resilience and readiness enhance Egypt’s position as a digital IT services hub and drive more demand and growth for technology services providers

By ; Nahla Makled- Adel Farig

 Egypt’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency - ITIDA has taken part in the first virtual conference of the Global Technology & Business Services Council (GT&BSC), conducted on the 30th November and 1st December 2020, to uniquely gather 12 of the world’s premier global technology and business services associations. Inspired by the phenomenal response across sourcing partnerships around the world amid challenges that rose with COVID-19, the conference aims to collaborate in constructing a global vision for the industry’s future, and a series of monthly deep dive events will follow. The conference comes under “one industry, one vision, truly global” and marks the inauguration of a series of events. ITIDA’s CEO, Amr Mahfouz, joined “the global response to COVID-19” panel, where he said that the pandemic took not only Egypt but also the whole world by surprise.

“Egypt was ready and adapted immensely well thanks to the huge investments made in developing the infrastructure not only in the ICT (USD 1.6 billion) but the power and energy infrastructure“ Mahfouz affirmed.

“This has enabled the country to showing great resilience and adaptability unlike many other countries in different regions “he added. The ICT sector in Egypt has remained remarkably resilient achieving a growth rate of 15.2% and around EGP 108 billion of revenues, compared to 93 billion in the preceding fiscal year.

The sector’s contribution to the GDP was about 4.4%. Mahfouz stated that the ICT sector in Egypt has played a key role in lessening the impacts of the pandemic, helping avoiding service interruption, hiring talents from impacted sectors like tourism, while ensuring the safety of its employees through adopting new business models.

“Egypt has invested heavily in developing its digital capabilities especially in freelancing and remote-work skills where this enabled the services sector to remain resilient, meet the unprecedented demand and increase reliance on digital services in all areas” Mahfouz underlined.

Demonstrated resilience amid the pandemic augmented Egypt’s global appeal for outsourcing and IT business services investments and encouraged more demand from enterprises to choose Egypt as a technology hub offering outstanding global services. Mahfouz said that ITIDA extends its support to attract more investments in the coming period, drawing on the pandemic’s constructive experience for the ICT sector in Egypt.

The series also witnessed announcing market insights from a report prepared by Everest Group on the main challenges facing companies in 2021. The global research and consulting group listed that adapting to new business models, slow down in decision-making, cost pressure, recovery from the pandemic, and talent shortage to atop the expected challenges.

The report emphasized that cloud computing and cybersecurity services will be top priorities of the digital businesses during the next period. Moreover, it pointed out that more than 70% of the sector companies still expect to achieve financial performance, which exceeds or meets the targeted prospects of 2020. The GT&BSC; which ITIDA joined last July as a founding member, is an alliance of twelve international associations representing the technology and business services sector across Bulgaria, the Balkans, Czech Republic, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, United States and Ukraine.