Egypt as a technology hub?

To be honest, Egypt has not come up as a candidate in global labor pools I have helped clients assess. But I remember from my time in Saudi a while ago, we had plenty of Egyptian programmers and systems administrators. Their Arabic skills clearly helped in addition to their technical skills. Number of Egyptians are also fluent in French.

So, I was not surprised to see Egypt's technology promotion group sponsor events at this week's Nasscom conference in India.

As this blog mentions

- Egypt has one of the World’s lowest telecom costs

- Egypt is emerging as a key partner location for the Indian outsourcing sector. I was surprised to know that Satyam and Wipro have already set up their facilities there. Multinationals like Unilever, Vodafone, IBM, Microsoft, P&G are already there.

- Egypt has one of the lowest (staff) attrition.

While the oil price boom in the Middle East, expect Egypt to emerge as a much stronger regional player over the next few years.

See also another post today on more Hasso Plattner's Africa Fund