• Geographical proximity: Egypt can be considered a nearshore outsourcing destination to most EU countries (flight duration to Cairo is 5 hours from London, and 4 hours from Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich or Frankfurt).
• Time zone
  • GMT+02:00
  • GMT+03:00, Daylight Saving Time (1 May- 1 October)
• In its yearly report titled "Global Services Location Index" for 2005, AT Kearney (one of the world’s largest management consulting firms) recently ranked Egypt number 12 in a list of 40 top offshore outsourcing destinations.
  
  The criteria AT Kearney considered when preparing this index were: the country's financial structure, business environment, country risk, country infrastructure, cultural adaptability, security of intellectual property and the skills of its human resources.
  
  The fact that Egypt is ranked number 12 in this index is a clear indication of Egypt's emergence as the world's next offshore outsourcing hotspot.
• A whitepaper titled "Emerging opportunities - Offshore outsourcing in Egypt" published in 2005 by Datamonitor, an international provider of business intelligence reports, examined Egypt as a destination for offshore outsourcing.
  
  The report assessed the demographic, social, political, and economic situation in Egypt as an offshore outsourcing location. Following are the main issues discussed in the paper and Datamonitor's findings:
  1. Workforce
     • Education: "Approximately 80,000 students graduating in [information technology] domain annually".
     • Linguistic Ability: "Egyptian labor force is known for its proficiency in western languages", "at the university level, instruction is carried out predominantly in English".
     • Stability: "Unionization is not widespread, and strikes are extremely rare".
  2. Economy
     • "The Egyptian economy is both stable and growing".
     • There have been "consistent growth of [the] stock market over the past five years ….with no evidence of downturn or disruption" which shows the "ever-increasing confidence among both domestic and global investors in [ the Egyptian] market".
  3. Political stability
     • "Egypt’s political system is characterized by regular multiparty elections … in contrast to other countries in the Middle East, which have experienced large ideological swings, in many cases at the expense of foreign investment.".
  4. Legal system
     • To attract foreign investors, the Egyptian government has made recent changes to the business law, some of which are "heightened provisions against fraud".
     • The changes also dealt with IPR as "protection of intellectual property rights have also been strengthened to western standards.

Click here to read "Global Services Location Index" by AT Kearney.
Click here to read "Emerging opportunities - Offshore outsourcing in Egypt" report by Datamonitor.