The Egypt Stock Exchange (EGX) has started to recover at the beginning of the week regaining 20 billion Egyptian pounds of its capital market losses over the past week amid the global COVID-19 outbreak crisis.
The EGX 30 saw an upward rise of 5.92 percent to reach 9,751 points, the EGX 70 rose by 3.5 percent, while the EGX 100 rose by 4.27 percent.
Sunday’s performance was dominated by Egyptian purchases at a net total of 11,639 billion pounds, foreigners’ recording 1,173 billion pounds, while Arabs recorded only 42,952 million pounds.
Corporates purchases held the lion’s share at 97.16 percent, while individual purchases declined to 2.83 percent.
Gross selling among foreigners reached 10,278 billion pounds.
The stock market has started to respond to measures adopted over the past week to energise the market.
The EGX recovery came as a result of the initiative that the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) and Banque du Caire launched at the end of last week that pumped 3 billion pounds into the EGX to offset its losses and improve its performance.
The EGX lost 162.225 billion pounds from its capital market since the beginning of March amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
In the past week, the government announced a catalytic package, including measures reducing brokerage commissions and financial market listing fees, and fees of bourse operations by 17 percent, and decreasing fees introduced by Misr for Central Clearing, Depository & Registry Company by 20 percent with maximum of 5,000 pounds, or equivalent in hard currency.
Egypt’s cabinet approved also a package to boost the Egypt Stock Exchange, including reducing the stamp tax for foreign investors from 1.5 pounds to 1.25 percent per 1,000 pounds, until the implementation of a capital gains tax starting 2022.
It has also exempted immediate stock transactions from any stamp tax, to boost trading, and exclude foreign investors from the capital gains tax, postponing implementation for local investors to January 2022.
