Why Companies Outsource to Egypt

Egypt is not the cheapest country in the world to outsource work to, nor the largest, and a page that tells an overseas buyer otherwise is selling rather than explaining. Egypt’s real case is narrower and more practical: for a company in Europe, the Gulf or the wider MENA region, it offers a working day that overlaps the buyer’s own, delivery in Arabic and English, and a cost base below western Europe. London Trade, an Egyptian outsourcing company operating since 2015, builds and runs teams on exactly that basis.

The time zone is the strongest single argument for outsourcing to Egypt. Cairo sits an hour or two from most European capitals and within an hour or two of the Gulf, so a team in Egypt works the same day as the client rather than the day before or after it. A question raised in Madrid, Milan or Dubai at ten in the morning is answered that morning, not in tomorrow’s handover note, and that is the difference between a supplier and a colleague. London Trade runs its client teams in Egypt on the client’s hours for precisely this reason.

The comparison that matters most is with the far-eastern destinations. A team in the Philippines has largely finished its working day by the time offices in Europe open, and a team in India overlaps European hours across only half of the day, so each round of question and answer costs a day of elapsed time. Outsourcing to Egypt does not carry that penalty. Against Poland and Romania, which sit in the same hours or close to them, Egypt’s time zone is not an advantage at all — there the argument has to be cost, Arabic, or both, and London Trade would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Egypt’s working week runs Sunday to Thursday. It overlaps the European Monday-to-Friday week on four of its five days and matches the Sunday-to-Thursday week still kept across much of the Gulf, which is why an Egyptian supplier can serve a European client and a Gulf client from one operation. The gap is Friday, and it is a real one: an Egyptian team is normally off while European offices are working. London Trade staffs to the client’s calendar rather than the local default, because it employs the people in Egypt directly and sets the rota itself.

Egypt has a large and young population, and its universities and technical institutes turn out graduates every year in engineering, computing, accounting, business administration and languages. London Trade does not publish a graduate count, because the number that decides an outsourcing contract is not the national one — it is how many of those people can be recruited, trained and kept in the specific role being outsourced, in the specific city it is being done in. A large intake makes a team in Egypt possible to build and rebuild; it does not, by itself, make that team good.

Arabic and English are the working languages of Egyptian business and of London Trade itself, which is what makes Egypt straightforward for any outsourced service delivered in either. Egypt also has genuine, if smaller, capability in French, German and Italian, sustained by long-established language schools and university language faculties, and that is enough to support multilingual help desks and customer-facing work. A buyer who needs an entire operation running in German or French at volume should test that specific pool before committing — Morocco, where French is a language of business and education, is a deeper market for French-language work, and an honest comparison concedes that.

On cost, Egypt sits below western Europe and below several of the established offshore markets, but London Trade publishes no comparative rates and no percentage saving, because an honest figure does not exist in the abstract. What a team costs depends on the role, the language, the shift pattern and the experience being asked for: a night-shift German-speaking support agent and a daytime Arabic-speaking back-office clerk are not on the same scale in any country. A buyer should also settle in the contract who carries movement in the Egyptian pound against the currency they pay in, because that movement has changed the real cost of Egyptian delivery before and will do so again.

The cost that actually decides an outsourcing contract is rarely the hourly rate. It is the cost of a seat that keeps working: recruitment, replacement when somebody leaves, supervision, premises, and the productivity lost while a new joiner learns the account. Attrition is the standard failure mode of offshore teams everywhere, Egypt included, and it is managed on the ground or not at all. London Trade employs the people on its clients’ accounts in Egypt directly, supervises them where they work and replaces them when it has to, which is where that cost is genuinely controlled.

Choosing Egypt settles only half of the question. Somebody still has to recruit the people, employ them lawfully, pay them, put them somewhere to work, supervise them daily and keep them long enough to be worth training. London Trade has been doing that in Egypt since 2015: it employs and manages more than 3,000 people on behalf of client companies across Egypt, including more than 40 stores it runs as a franchise partner of Vodafone Egypt. That retail operation is not the offer — it is the evidence that London Trade can run a large distributed workforce in Egypt to somebody else’s standards and reporting lines.

Egypt is not the right answer to every requirement, and London Trade will say so when it is not. Work that a client’s own regulator or customer contract requires to be performed inside the European Union cannot be performed in Egypt, and a member state is the correct answer. An operation that has to run on North American hours means a permanent night shift in Egypt, which costs more and turns over faster wherever in the world it is placed. Buyers building very large English-language voice operations reasonably shortlist India and the Philippines alongside Egypt. Egypt is strongest where European or Gulf hours, Arabic and English, and a mid-range cost base all matter in the same requirement.

Not every company reading this page is overseas. The same teams, supervision and employment administration that London Trade puts behind an overseas contract also serve the domestic market: companies in Egypt outsource IT support, payroll and back-office work to London Trade for the same reasons an overseas buyer does, with the added advantage that the supplier, the staff and the statutory obligations all sit in the same jurisdiction as the client. For the local market the argument is not the time zone at all — it is handing a function to an organisation whose actual business is running it.