CAIRO: Egyptian real estate firm Palm Hills Developments said on Monday it would relaunch a delayed Red Sea development in the fourth quarter of 2010 and start marketing a bond issue by the end of the year.
The company is stepping up construction work on its projects, including developments in Cairo and on the Mediterranean coast, which will keep its cash flows negative in 2010, 2011 and possibly 2012, executives said in a conference call.
"I think the name of the game for us over the coming three to four years is ‘execution, execution’," Chairman Yasseen Mansour said.
The firm will start completing homes in its Hacienda Bay development on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast during the third or fourth quarter of this year, Mansour said.
Mansour said he expected sales on Egypt’s north coast to be some 50 percent higher this year than last, helping the company reach LE 14 billion to LE 15 billion ($2.5-2.7 billion) worth of unfinished projects by the end of the year.
A project in Ain Sokhna on the Red Sea that was held up by red tape will be relaunched in the last week of September or the first half of October, he added.
Palm Hills said on Sunday it recorded the most ever reservations of new units in the second quarter of this year, although net profit was down on 2009.
Bonds
The company will start marketing up to LE 1 billion of bonds before the end of the year after an initial delay, Mansour said.
"We’re hoping to go ahead and start marketing our bond issue before year-end," he said. "We’re sticking to our old issuance, anywhere from LE 500 million to LE 1 billion."
Mansour said the company owned enough land for now, but would start looking to expand east of Cairo "pretty soon," eyeing plots of 2 million square meters or more.
