CAIRO: A three-day trade tour intended to bolster ties between small and medium-sized business owners in Italy and Egypt will end today.
The conference, which included over 350 Italian businesspeople from about 200 mostly small companies, was the largest trade mission Egypt has ever hosted, according to the Confederation of Italian Industries.
Over the past four years, Italy has sent similar delegations to countries as far-flung as Brazil and Kazakhstan in an effort to boost investment in emergent markets, said Simone Palmarini, a representative for the Confederation. The conference concluding yesterday was the 21st of its kind and the first in Egypt.
Egypt and Italy are historically strong trading partners, with nearly ?4 billion in total trade last year, according to a report by Intesa Sanpaolo, the Italian firm that purchased the Bank of Alexandria last year.
Italy’s largest export to Egypt is machinery, which constitutes about half of its total market here, the report said. Its largest import from Egypt is fuel.
The confederation lauded this week’s conference as a milestone in the opening of the Egyptian economy, which has been increasingly dominated by policies of liberalization and privatization in recent years. Many analysts credit these policies, coupled with a swiftly growing economy, for the spike in foreign investment seen here over the past half-decade.
But some protectionist attitudes linger, particularly as the state has moved to staunch inflation and its effects over the past month. Less than two weeks before the Italian delegation arrived, lofty cement and rice prices prompted Egypt to ban exports of both products.
