Egypt’s stock market, once one of the country’s economic success stories, has been sliding for the past two weeks.
After closing 2014 as one of the world’s best performing equity markets, it now ranks among the worst.
The benchmark EGX30 index bottomed out at a 20-month low of 6,654 points on Monday, after soaring above 10,000 points earlier in the year.
Although it has recovered slightly in the last two days, the EGX30 was down by almost 23 percent year-to-date at the close of trading Wednesday.
The Egyptian exchange’s woes can be tied to a triple whammy of global, regional and domestic factors.
Egypt stock market
Egypt stock market
China and the Global Meltdown
After a summer already marked by dizzying highs and lows on the Chinese stock market, the past month has seen a string of unsettling economic news come out of China.
As the second largest economy in the world, anything that happens to China has a huge impact across the globe. It is a huge consumer of raw materials, from Venezuelan oil to Egyptian marble. Its factories drive the global shipping trade. The country’s more than 1.3 billion consumers are a substantial market in their own right and power the market for high-end consumer goods.
Since late July, China’s stock market has experienced its most dramatic falls since the 2007 Asian Financial Crisis, the People’s Bank of China has devalued the yuan, and a business survey indicated that activity in Chinese factories contracted at the sharpest rate in more than six years.
None of these necessarily signals an economic apocalypse. China is still growing, just not as quickly as before. (Quarterly growth figures of 7 percent would be cause for jubilation in most countries, including Egypt.)
But the recent news indicate that China can’t continue indefinitely as an unstoppable economic juggernaut that powers economic growth worldwide and has also cast doubt on Chinese officials’ ability to manage the economy. This makes investors worldwide nervous.
Some analysts also feel the news from China was just a trigger for a sell-off that was bound to come sooner or later. Stock indexes like the US Dow Jones have been outperforming the broader economy, leading to speculation that stocks are overvalued and are bound to cool down to reflect the real value of the companies buyers are investing in.
Why does this affect Egypt?
“If investors are leery, they will be pulling out of markets. Egypt is no exception,” says Mohamed Farid CEO of Dcode Economic and Financial Consulting.
“Stock exchanges are part of a globalized economy and what happens in one economy is bound to affect others,” he says. “It’s very normal to be caught up in the turmoil.”
In general, the fall of the Chinese stock market has made investors nervous about so-called “emerging markets” — a category Egypt falls into, along with China and countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia.
In recent years, emerging markets have been hailed as good investment bets, offering higher rates of return than stocks in more developed economies. China’s fall from grace has badly shaken investors, and Egypt has been caught up in the scare.
Regional markets: The impact of oil prices
Even before the Chinese market crashed, stock markets across the Middle East and North Africa had been on the decline thanks to low oil prices.
Low oil prices have a direct impact on the profitability—and by extension the share price—of companies working in the petroleum sector. In countries where oil revenues are a major contributor to state coffers, falling oil prices also have a ripple effect across the economy as a whole. Low oil prices means the government and individual consumers have less money to spend, dampening the economic prospects of companies across the board, from real estate to consumer goods.
As a net energy importer, low oil prices shouldn’t be bad news for Egypt. “Declining oil prices in Egypt lower the subsidy bill, and alleviate pressure on the budget,” Farid says. Cheaper fuel also ease the country’s balance of payment deficit and can help spur economic growth.
Some analysts have speculated that economic troubles in the oil industry will harm Egypt by limiting the largesse Arab Gulf countries are able to bestow on Egypt, but Farid is skeptical. Egypt’s Arab allies have already announced they will shift away from grants in favor of loans and investments. He explains that this should not be affected by the downturn in oil prices.
Still, low commodity prices are contributing to the general gloomy mood in both regional and global stock exchanges.
Domestic affairs
Local events are more likely to have an impact on Egypt’s stock market than economic ups and downs elsewhere in the MENA region.
Egypt’s stock market is highly sensitive to local political and economic news, which is hardly surprising given the country’s volatility and the fragility of its economic recovery. News of new taxes, or terrorist attacks can send the whole market into a spin.
The same time bad news starting coming out of China, the EGX was hit by two events closer to home.
State media announced August 13 that shares belonging to Juhayna chairman Safwan Thabet would be frozen because of his alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood and the possibility the firm might be nationalized. On August 16, the first trading day following the announcement, the EGX30 fell by 3.2 percent to hit a one-month low.
On August 18, the Egyptian Competition Authority announced that it had referred rug and carpet manufacturing company Oriental Weavers for prosecution on charges of “monopolistic practices.” The market EGX30 tumbled by 2.6 percent that day, and an additional 2.1 percent on August 19, bringing the market to an 18-month low.
On the other hand, news that might be expected to have a positive impact on the market, such as Sunday’s confirmation that the Capital Gains tax would be suspended and brokers reimbursed, failed to push up the market. “It came along in one of the worst weeks for global markets in a few years,” says Mohamed Abu Basha, economist at EFG-Hermes. “It’s a relief that the law was released, but not enough to outweigh global trends.”
The market did rebound slightly the next day, along with markets worldwide, following announcements from the Chinese central bank that it planned to intervene to try and get the economy back on track.
Where next for Egypt?
According to Farid, the fact that stocks fell and then rose virtually across the board indicates that the market downturn has more to do with global factors than with the local economy or weakness in any particular sector.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that things will settle down just yet, though, or that the market will bounce all the way back.
“It is very natural to see volatility in markets in such turbulent times,” Farid says. “Whenever the market tumbles significantly, there are always new equilibrium prices that appear.”
Stock prices soar and crash on rumors, hopes and fears, but the companies people are buying pieces of do have an actual value: they earn or lose money, own buildings and factories, have brand name customers, do or do not respect new products and projects in the pipeline. The market may twist and turn, but eventually stock prices should settle down to reflect the value of the companies in the market.
But prices may go further down before that new equilibrium is reached. Farid says it’s common to see “overshooting” in which nervous investors sell stocks for less than their true value before the market stabilizes. “Until investments restore the new equilibrium price, usually prices go below this point,” he says.
Ultimately, how well the market recovers will depend on the strength of the country’s economic fundamentals and the performance of individual companies, but global events could mean the EGX is still in for a bumpy ride in the short term.