Hatem El-Banna, Chairperson of Zaldi Capital Investments, has said that his company is considering expanding in the Saudi market this year through providing research and consulting services. He added that Zaldi Capital sees great potential in that step.
El-Banna told Daily News Egypt that the company sensed a demand for these services through its contacts with a number of investors, but it is necessary to study the risks as well as the opportunities before making the decision to expand, describing the competition in the Saudi market as “fierce.”
The chairman of Zaldi Capital added that the Saudi market enjoys promising opportunities, a positive vision for investors, and a strong ability to attract capital, but identifying risks related to the market depends on experience.
El-Banna added that the Egyptian market also generally enjoys many attractions that make it more capable of overcoming negative repercussions. For instance, over the past two years, it managed to overcome the negative repercussions of the Coronavirus pandemic and even achieve positive growth rates, making Egypt one of the few countries in the region that have managed to achieve positive growth rates.
Moreover, he said that his company’s current strategy to maximize assets is based on a promotional plan aimed at managing new financial portfolios, whether for investors or local institutions, to raise the volume of assets under management to more than EGP 2bn by the end of this year. The current volume of assets currently being managed amounts to EGP 1.3bn.
He stressed that the expansion plans are based on several axes, and they include domestic and foreign expansion, as well as bringing new activities into the group. The group will especially focus on attracting foreign portfolios from the Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia, while establishing and managing investment funds – the activity for which the company obtained a license from the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA).
