Textiles were at the top of the agenda last week in Shanghai, where officials of the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZONE) met with Chinese investors bringing business to Egypt, which counts apparel and textiles as its second-biggest exports market.
Walid Gamal El-Din, the chairman of the SCZONE, signed agreements with Chinese executives to establish a number of textile projects in the West Qantara Industrial Zone. The projects were valued at an estimated $101.3 million.
The mix included one firm agreement and three letters of intent for other textile companies. The former was a usufruct agreement, or agreement to use a parcel or property without altering it, with the Hengsheng Dying Zhejiang Company which plans to invest $70 million in the construction of a more than 2-million-square-foot dyeing, processing and textile manufacturing facility.
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Also in the West Qantara Industrial Zone, a letter of intent was signed by Shaoxing Yuding Textile Company for a new $5 million factory, Dinghang Egypt. The roughly 137,000-square-foot plant will export 90 percent of its production to the U.S. and European markets.
The second of three letters of intent was signed by Shengzhou Captain Industrial & Trading. It plans to build a $5 million, 129,000-square-foot factory for the production of spandex, polyester and elastic materials.
The third signed letter of intent was executed with Indochine Holdings, a major player in the Chinese textiles sector. It plans to invest $21.3 million in the construction of a roughly 700,000-square-foot factory, 90 percent of whose production would be exported to the U.S. and European markets.
These investments in Egypt by Chinese textile companies comes on the heels of an announcement in late August by Chinese developer TEDA-Egypt that it had laid the cornerstone of a $60 million, six-building, 1.6 million-square-foot facility the company, Egypt Cady Textiles, said will produce 50,000 tons of high-end “environmentally friendly” polyester textiles and 8 million seamless garments using smart manufacturing methods. Construction is to begin by the end of this year and is expected to be completed by the end of 2024. It will be TEDA-Egypt’s largest factory to date and part of the company’s broader expansion in the Sokhna zone on the Gulf of Suez’s western shore, where it operates more than 130 industrial and service facilities worth about $1.6 billion.
Egypt’s apparel exports have seen a downward trend for much of this year. They fell 4 percent in January to $196 million, versus $203 million a year earlier. March produced a bigger 24 percent decline and the trend worsened in April, when exports took a 32 percent tumble. Things seemed to turn around in May, which yielded a 14 percent increase to $215 million, but exports fell again in June, by 17 percent. For the January-to-June period, exports were down 12 percent from the same timeframe last year, according to the Apparel Export Council of Egypt. The country exports the lion’s share of its textile products to non-Arab African nations, at $1.2 billion for the six months through June. In the same period it sent nearly $500 million to the U.S.
