EFG-Hermes: Egypt financial leasing to pick up on the long run

Egypt’s financial leasing industry faces short-term challenges but will be able to pick up pace on the long run, head of EFG Hermes Leasing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cairo-based investment bank EFG Hermes, said on Tuesday.

Speaking at the second annual financial leasing conference in Cairo, Wael Ziada further said he expects the country’s financial leasing activity would register over 15 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.7 billion) by the end of the current year.

However, Egypt ongoing dollar shortage has negatively affected the local leasing firms’ turnovers in terms of the volume of equipment and machinery imports, which declined to represent 3 percent of the country’s total GDP, he added.

Egyptian government has to start actual steps to solve the dollar shortage by floating the national currency as an initial move to fix the exchange rate, the EFG-Hermes official stated.