Common questions

London Trade is an Egyptian outsourcing company that employs and manages people in Egypt on behalf of other companies, across IT, HR and professional services. Operating since 2015, London Trade employs more than 3,000 people on client accounts across Egypt, runs more than 40 stores as a franchise partner of Vodafone Egypt, and has an in-house legal and government affairs team of more than 20 lawyers. The client decides what the work has to achieve and to what standard; London Trade carries the recruitment, the employment contracts, the payroll, the supervision and the daily management that make it happen. The head office is at 5 Mossadak Street, Dokki, Giza, and the working languages are Arabic and English.

London Trade’s head office is at 5 Mossadak Street, Dokki, Giza 12611, Egypt, and the company works across the country rather than in Cairo alone. Besides the head office it has regional offices in Mansoura, Tanta, Fayoum, Minya, Assiut, Sohag and Qena, and teams in more than 40 locations, including governorates well outside the capital, with local supervision at each one. For an outsourcing buyer that matters in two practical ways: staff can be recruited where the right skills are actually available, and a client who needs people in several cities does not have to open a base in each of them. Overseas clients reach all of those teams through one relationship at the head office in Giza.

London Trade’s IT outsourcing covers software development and testing, application support and maintenance, technical helpdesk and end-user support, infrastructure and network administration, data entry and data processing, and IT field services at client sites across Egypt. London Trade recruits the engineers and technicians, employs them in Egypt, and manages attendance, cover, escalation and replacement, while the client sets the technical direction, the tools and the standard of work. Teams work in Arabic and English, and they can sit in the client’s own offices, in London Trade premises, or remotely, depending on what the work and the data involved require.

Hiring software developers in Egypt without opening your own company there is possible, and it is one of the most common reasons overseas businesses come to London Trade. London Trade employs the developers in Egypt under its own Egyptian employment arrangements and assigns them to work to your direction, so you get the team without incorporating, registering as an employer or running an Egyptian payroll yourself. You define the roles, interview the shortlist and approve who joins; London Trade handles the contracts, the payroll, the statutory employment obligations and the day-to-day employment relationship. The same arrangement works for one developer or for a full delivery team with its own team leader.

HR outsourcing with London Trade covers the whole employment cycle in Egypt: recruitment and onboarding, employment contracts, payroll processing, social insurance and statutory employment filings, attendance and leave administration, personnel records, and the day-to-day handling of employee questions, disciplinary matters and exits. London Trade can take on a whole HR function for an Egyptian company that would rather not build one, or act as the employer in Egypt for an overseas company that has no entity in the country. What stays with the client is the decision about who is hired, what they are paid and what they are expected to deliver. The specific statutory obligations that apply vary by activity and by headcount, and London Trade confirms them for each client before an arrangement starts.

An employer of record is a company that legally employs staff on another company’s behalf, and London Trade performs that role in Egypt. Under this arrangement London Trade issues the employment contract, pays the salary, makes the statutory employment filings and holds the formal employer responsibilities, while the people concerned work to the client’s instructions on the client’s projects. The client gets staff in Egypt without registering as an employer there and without an Egyptian payroll of its own. Overseas companies use it when they are testing the Egyptian market, when their own entity is not yet ready, or when they simply do not want to run employment administration in a country where they have no HR presence.

An overseas company does not necessarily need its own legal entity in Egypt in order to have people working there, because it can engage them through an Egyptian employer such as London Trade, which employs the staff and assigns them to the client’s work. Whether an entity is required at all depends on what the company intends to do in Egypt: employing people through an outsourcing partner is a different question from selling, invoicing, importing or holding a licence locally, and each of those may carry requirements of its own. The position varies by activity and should be confirmed for your specific case rather than assumed from someone else’s. What London Trade can say plainly is that clients have staff working in Egypt today without an Egyptian company of their own.

London Trade’s professional services outsourcing in Egypt covers finance and accounting back-office work, administrative and document processing, customer service and call handling, legal and government affairs through an in-house team of more than 20 lawyers, procurement and supplier administration, field and retail operations, and warehouse and logistics operations run on a client’s behalf. These are functions that consume management attention without distinguishing the business from its competitors, which is why companies hand them over. London Trade’s evidence for running work of this kind at scale is operational rather than theoretical: it runs more than 40 stores in Egypt as a franchise partner of Vodafone Egypt, and staffs client operations in more than 40 locations across the country.

London Trade provides legal and government relations services in Egypt through an in-house team of more than 20 lawyers and 10 government relations representatives, working from its head office in Giza and seven regional offices across the country. The team handles company formation and restructuring, commercial and franchise contracts, intellectual property registration, licences and permits, the legalisation of documents with ministries, embassies and notary offices, regulatory compliance, and representation in disputes before Egyptian courts and arbitration bodies. Clients use it on its own or alongside an outsourced team, so the legal side of an operation in Egypt sits with the same company that runs the operation.

Egypt’s strongest advantages over India, Poland and the Philippines are time-zone overlap, Arabic and English as working languages, and travel proximity to Europe and the Gulf. A team in Egypt shares most of the working day with both Europe and the Gulf, so questions are settled the same day rather than the next one, which is not true of South and South-East Asian locations. Arabic alongside English matters to Gulf and wider MENA buyers in a way that Central European locations cannot match, and Cairo is a short flight from most European and Gulf capitals. London Trade’s honest position is that Egypt wins clearly where overlap and Arabic matter; where neither does, the comparison is more open and worth running on your own numbers.

Egypt sits an hour or two from both continental Europe and the Gulf, so an Egyptian team shares most of the working day with either of them. In practice a team in Egypt is at its desk through the European morning and the Gulf afternoon, which means live handovers, same-day answers and shared meetings rather than work queuing overnight. The working week is the other half of the question: the usual week in Egypt runs Sunday to Thursday, which matches Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf and gives four shared days with a Monday-to-Friday week, as kept in Europe and, since 2022, in the UAE. London Trade arranges cover around whichever week the client works, including Monday-to-Friday teams for European clients, rather than assuming everyone keeps the same days.

Staff augmentation, a dedicated team and a managed service are the three ways London Trade structures outsourcing work in Egypt, and they differ in how much responsibility moves from the client to London Trade. With staff augmentation, London Trade employs individual specialists in Egypt who work inside the client’s own team and report to the client’s managers, and the client directs the work day to day. With a dedicated team, London Trade recruits and employs a whole team that works for that client only, usually with a London Trade team leader handling attendance, cover and replacement, while the client still sets the priorities. With a managed service, the client buys an outcome — a function run to an agreed standard — and London Trade decides how many people that takes and how they are organised. Most clients start with one model and move along that line as the relationship settles.

London Trade prices each engagement on its scope rather than from a rate card, and quotes only once the shape of the work is clear. The variables that move the price are the roles and skill levels involved, how many people, how long the engagement runs, how many locations they are spread across, whether London Trade is supplying people or taking responsibility for an outcome, and what equipment, premises or travel the work requires. Staff augmentation is usually priced per person per month; a managed service is priced against the service level agreed. London Trade sets out the basis of the price in writing before an engagement starts, so the client can see what would change it and what would not. Send an outline of what you need to contactus@londontrade-eg.com for a specific quotation.

London Trade can normally put a small team to work faster than a client can hire the same people directly, because recruitment, employment and payroll are functions already running rather than things to be set up. What drives the timeline is the shape of the requirement: common frontline, support and administrative roles fill quickly because there is a live candidate pipeline, while senior, scarce or highly specialised technical roles take longer because the search itself is harder, and a large team spread across several governorates takes longer than a handful of people in Cairo. Client-side approvals, interview availability and any background or security requirements also move the date. London Trade gives an indicative start date once roles and volumes are agreed, and updates it as recruitment proceeds instead of quoting a standard figure it cannot stand behind.

London Trade treats client data as the client’s property and handles confidentiality as a contractual and operational obligation on its own side, not as something left to individual discretion. Every engagement is covered by a confidentiality agreement, and the individuals assigned to a client are bound by confidentiality terms in their own employment contracts, which London Trade holds because it is the employer. Operationally, London Trade agrees with each client which systems the team may use, what may be stored or moved, who has access to what, and what happens to that access and to any material held when a person leaves the account or the engagement ends. Clients with stricter requirements — restricted devices, client-controlled systems, or work performed only on client premises — have those controls written into the engagement rather than assumed.

Clients own the intellectual property in work produced for them by a London Trade team in Egypt, and London Trade’s agreements are written to put that beyond doubt rather than leave it implied. Assignment to the client of rights in code, designs, documents and other deliverables is set out in the client agreement, and the individuals working on the account are bound by corresponding terms in their employment contracts, so nothing rests on an employee’s personal position. Where a client wants a different arrangement — joint ownership, a licence back, or carve-outs for pre-existing tools and components that either side brings to the work — that is agreed in writing before the work begins. London Trade does not reuse one client’s deliverables on another client’s account.

London Trade replaces a person who is not working out, and the cost and administration of doing so sit with London Trade rather than with the client, because London Trade is the employer. The client raises the concern, London Trade establishes whether it is a matter of capability, conduct, training or simple fit, and then either corrects it or starts a replacement while arranging cover so the work does not stop. Ending an individual’s employment follows Egyptian employment procedure and is handled by London Trade as the employer; the client is not a party to it. Replacement terms, including the expected handover and how long cover runs, are written into the agreement at the start rather than negotiated at the moment a problem appears.

Start by contacting London Trade at contactus@londontrade-eg.com or on +20 10 2020 2828 and describing what you want done in Egypt, at what scale and over what period. London Trade’s first step is a scoping conversation that establishes the roles or the function involved, where the people need to be, which engagement model fits and what the client keeps control of. A written proposal follows, setting out the scope, the engagement model, the commercial basis and how performance will be measured. Recruitment or transition begins once terms are agreed. Overseas companies with no presence in Egypt are welcome to open the conversation before they have decided anything about an entity, because the answer often changes what they decide.

London Trade recruits continuously across Egypt, both for its own operations and for the client accounts it staffs, so vacancies exist at most times of the year. Roles include software developers and IT support staff, HR, payroll and finance administrators, customer service and call handling, retail and field positions in the stores and operations London Trade manages, and supervisory and area management roles. Because London Trade staffs client work in more than 40 locations, jobs are not limited to Cairo and Giza. Send your CV to contactus@londontrade-eg.com, naming the role and the governorate you are interested in, and say whether you work in Arabic, English or both.