Sarah Khaled is keenly monitoring the price movement in the Egyptian market, in preparation for purchasing electrical appliances before her wedding at the beginning of next year, amid fluctuations in the price of the dollar against the pound over the past weeks, and regional tensions that negatively affect supply chains and are directly reflected in production inputs and the prices of imported goods.
Sarah, who works in a private company and lives in the Dar El Salam area, south of Cairo, noticed the rise in the prices of electrical appliances. She said: “Prices are rising, and at the same time there are offers to encourage purchases.” She took advantage of the “offers” and bought small kitchen appliances, and was hoping to buy the rest of the appliances if it weren’t for the “liquidity crisis.”
The rise in commodity prices was accompanied by an increase in the dollar exchange rate recently, as it recorded 52.70 pounds in Egyptian banks after it was about 48 pounds before the Iranian war last February. The rise in the exchange rate usually reflects on the movement of commodity prices, especially durable appliances whose manufacture depends on imports, according to the head of the Electrical Appliances Division at the Giza Chamber of Commerce in Egypt, George Zakaria, who, in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, referred to what he described as “the state of stagnation that the market is currently witnessing,” which makes merchants unable to raise prices with weak purchasing activity.
Economist Ali Al-Idrissi points out that the Egyptian markets are suffering from a state of “confusion” that is reflected in the purchasing decisions made by citizens, as they face a dilemma as a result of the decline in purchasing power, but at the same time they fear rising prices. He added to Asharq Al-Awsat: “All current and expected indicators reflect expected increases in prices, which deepens the crisis for manufacturers, whose production costs are increasing on the one hand, while the market is witnessing a stagnation in buying and selling activity on the other hand.” He expected that the situation would become more difficult if the Central Bank decided to raise interest rates, which would have a greater impact on the industry, explaining that many factories were faltering and could not withstand.
Specialists have warned that the Egyptian market suffers from many risks, not only the rise in prices, but also the reduction in employment resulting from it, as with the rise in production costs and the weakness of purchasing activity, factories resorted to reducing their production by up to 50 percent of their production capacity, and were forced to lay off workers to reduce costs, which threatens the stability of the industrial market.
The head of the Egyptian Federation of Renewable Energy Organizations and Associations, Mohamed Helmy Helal, pointed to the impact of the decision to increase electricity prices last July, and said that it caused an increase in the cost of production by a rate ranging from 3 to 7 percent in regular industries, and 8 to 15 percent in energy-intensive industries.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi affirmed “not to harm his country’s constitution,” and said that “Egypt has a constitution that has been approved, and no one will touch it.” Al-Sisi’s assertions came in his speech at the forty-fourth educational symposium of the Egyptian Armed Forces, on the occasion of the anniversary of the victories of the October War of 1973. In the context of his talk about “attempts to target his country from within, and to spread psychological warfare targeting Egyptians’ confidence in state institutions.”
Al-Sisi pointed out that “the battle against targeting his country from abroad is still ongoing,” and he appealed to Egyptians to protect themselves from “continuous attempts to target public opinion,” and said that “the confrontation is a shared responsibility of the Egyptian people with government institutions.”
Human Rights Watch reported on Wednesday that the military authorities in eastern Libya have executed at least 31 people since late August, noting that these executions are the first announced in Libya as a whole since 2010. The organization condemned in a statement that forces under the control of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar executed these people “following extremely unfair military trials” that clearly lack “standards of justice.”
