Professional & Business Support Services in Egypt

Every company carries a layer of work that is necessary, repetitive and impossible to promote anybody for: invoices posted and reconciled, customers answered, licences renewed, forms submitted, records typed up and filed. London Trade runs that layer in Egypt on behalf of other companies, covering finance and accounting back office, customer service and contact centre operations, legal and government affairs, retail and field operations, warehouse and logistics operations, and document and data processing.

The evidence that London Trade can run another company’s operation is physical, and it is in Egypt. As a franchise partner of Vodafone Egypt, the company runs more than 40 Vodafone stores — staffed and supervised by London Trade, run to Vodafone’s standards and reported into Vodafone’s management line, not ours. A retail estate is the demanding version of this work: cash, stock, queues and customers, in dozens of places at once, under somebody else’s name. A finance back office or a contact centre is the same discipline in a quieter room.

London Trade has handled government relations and official paperwork for clients in Egypt since 2015 — licences, permits, renewals and submissions through the official portals. That work is carried by an in-house legal and government affairs team of more than 20 lawyers and 10 government relations representatives, working from the head office in Giza and regional offices from Mansoura to Qena. The difficulty in this work is almost never the form itself. It is knowing which authority owns a particular decision, what a complete file looks like before it is lodged rather than after it comes back, and whom to return to when a submission stops moving. That knowledge sits with people who do it every week, and it is not something a company can hire at short notice.

The same team gives clients the legal support most outsourcing companies have to buy in from a law firm: company formation and restructuring; shareholder, joint-venture and cross-border agreements; commercial, franchise and distribution contracts; intellectual property registration; the legalisation of documents with ministries, embassies and notary offices; compliance with Egyptian trade, tax and employment law; and representation in disputes before Egyptian courts and arbitration bodies. For a client, the legal side of an operation is handled by the same company that runs the operation, under the same contract.

For companies outside Egypt, the question is rarely whether the work can be done here. Egypt has the people, the languages and the cost position, and overseas buyers comparing Egypt against Poland, Morocco, India or the Philippines usually know that before they make contact. The real question is who will own the output. London Trade employs and manages more than 3,000 people in Egypt on behalf of client companies, works in Arabic and English, and shares most of the working day with Europe and the Gulf, so an overseas client’s queue is cleared while their own office is still open rather than overnight.

Egyptian companies tend to buy this for a different reason. The problem in a local business is rarely the cost of back-office labour; it is management attention — a small finance team that spends half its week keying invoices, a customer line answered by whoever is nearest to it, a renewal that surfaces a fortnight after it lapsed. London Trade takes those functions off an Egyptian company’s own payroll and out of its own supervision, and hands them back as a service with a standard, an owner and a report.

Two questions decide most of these conversations, and neither of them is price. The first is who handles the information: the people doing a client’s finance processing or customer contact in Egypt are employed by London Trade directly and supervised by London Trade’s own managers, so confidentiality rests on a contract of employment and a management line rather than on a chain of subcontractors the client has never met. The second is what happens when somebody leaves — under an outsourcing arrangement in Egypt, finding and training the replacement is London Trade’s problem, and the client sees continuity of service instead of a vacancy.

These functions are bought rather than built because of what they have in common: they are labour-heavy, administratively demanding and geographically spread, which makes them expensive to construct inside a company and comparatively cheap to buy from one that already runs them. London Trade already employs the people, supervises them across more than 40 locations in Egypt, and carries the administration that comes with them. The client keeps the policy, the systems of record and the decisions; London Trade supplies the staff, the supervision and the answer to whether the work was done.