Egypt’s bourse proposes depositary receipts for Dangote shares to deepen African ties
The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) has proposed exploring Egyptian Depositary Receipts (EDRs) linked to shares of Dangote Group’s companies, its chairman said Thursday, as the bourse seeks to expand cross-border investment and strengthen financial ties between North and West Africa.
“We are ready to work alongside your leadership team to examine the operational modalities for establishing an EDR framework,” EGX Chairman Omar Radwan told an event where the group’s President Aliko Dangote was a special guest.
The proposed framework could give Egyptian institutional investors and family offices a locally denominated way to gain exposure to commodity-backed industrial assets in West Africa, Radwan said. For international conglomerates, it would widen the investor base, lower capital costs, and unlock regional liquidity without the frictions of cross-border operations, he added.
“The Egyptian Exchange stands fully equipped, both in regulatory flexibility and technological capabilities, to execute large-scale cross-listings,” Radwan said. “If opportunities progress, the market framework is designed to handle sophisticated transactions, high transaction volumes, and transparency and disclosure requirements, at international standards of speed and security.”
“Our primary objective is clear: to establish Cairo as an agile, transparent, globally competitive capital market capable of deploying capital into transformative investments,” Radwan said.
“At the centre of our forward-looking strategies and aggressive drive is to attract leading multinational corporations and institutional powerhouses into the Egyptian market. We’re actively creating and enabling an environment tailored to large-scale operations seeking regional expansion of deep liquidity pools and strategic access to both Middle Eastern and African markets.”
“It lays the foundation for authentic industrial integration, aligning Egypt’s advanced manufacturing base, strategic logistics hub, and energy capabilities with West Africa’s massive scale and resource developments,” he said.
“Channeling regional equity into these cross-continental value chains is how our economies will achieve genuine economic sovereignty and resilience,” he said. “The trajectory of African capital markets is being redefined here.”
Radwan said EGX wanted to help move inter-African investment from policy statements into real market transactions, using frameworks such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and links between continental exchanges.
He described Thursday’s event as the start of a lasting partnership between the Cairo and Lagos exchanges.
Radwan said Egypt’s equity market had shown resilience in recent trading cycles, with rising valuations and sustained liquidity, which he attributed to structural reforms and improvements to the exchange’s trading framework.
He also praised Dangote’s leadership and said the group’s stock market listing, which he called Africa’s largest initial public offering, showed that African firms could attract global institutional investors.