MEFILES

Sisi orders a study of state strategic reserves, weeks after saying Egypt had six months' cover

A presidential statement issued late Saturday directs the military-run crisis authority to examine building a state stockpile. It names no commodity, no quantity, no budget and no deadline.

The statement, issued late on Saturday 7 November, said President Abdel Fattah El Sisi had directed the National Authority for Crisis and Emergency Management to “study the creation of strategic reserves for the state to counter emergency situations in co-ordination with the country’s institutions”, in The National’s rendering of the Arabic. He also instructed all state institutions to accelerate submission of their data to the authority, stressing the information must be accurate and regularly maintained to support decision-making. The meeting was with senior military officials and representatives of the authority; the independent Egyptian outlet Zawia3 names the recipient as Lt Gen Mohamed Abdel Rahman Rabie, Chief of the Armed Forces Operations Authority and head of the crisis authority — not Osama Rabie of the Suez Canal Authority. Zawia3 and Rio Times both treated the absence of detail as the story: the presidency gave no goods, quantities, budget or deadline.

The timing is the second problem. The directive came about two and a half weeks after Sisi told the Egypt 2026 Forum on 21 October that Egypt’s reserves of strategic goods suffice for six months, and five days after Supply Minister Sherif Farouk repeated the same figure. Zawia3 notes that six months is the number the government has repeated since 2022. The National attributes a commodity focus — basic food items, primarily wheat flour, amid concern that major hostilities in the Red Sea could disrupt supply chains — to unnamed sources; the presidential statement itself names nothing. The regional frame is explicit in The National’s account: the order follows Cairo’s declared plan to defend Saudi Arabia. Egyptian Streets reports that on 26 October parliament authorised Sisi to provide military assistance to Riyadh if requested, and is the only source in this sweep for that vote.

The same Saturday produced a second directive. At a separate meeting with the CEO of the Arab Organization for Industrialization, Major General Mohamed Abdel Fattah Abu Bakr, and the Armed Forces Vehicles Department Director, Major General Staff Walid Hassan al-Kordi, Sisi called for self-sufficiency in spare parts and domestic production of military vehicles and equipment, with capacity to export selected models to “friendly and sisterly countries”, in the Egyptian Gazette’s wording of the state agency MENA report. He inspected models of vehicles scheduled for development and local manufacture with the AOI. No figures, contract values or named platforms were released. Sisi warned last week that military escalation would have “disastrous” consequences for the region and the world, urging a diplomatic solution “before it’s too late”.

Assessment: Read the data instruction, not the stockpile. A president who has to order institutions to submit accurate and regularly maintained figures to a crisis authority is telling you the centre does not reliably know what the state holds — which is precisely what makes the six-month cover figure, unchanged since 2022, worth distrusting. Nothing here is procurement; it is a study order, and should not be filed as policy until money appears. The connective thread is remit: in one news cycle a military-run authority was handed the national reserve question and the military industrial organisation was told to localise and export, while the Fund’s standing criticism of Egypt is that divestment of non-strategic assets lags.

Evergreen returns to Suez after nearly three years, and capacity is still four-tenths short of 2023

The EVER EON made its maiden canal passage on Sunday. Sea-Intelligence puts October capacity at around 3m teu against roughly 5.5m teu in the same month of 2023.

Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie announced on Sunday 8 November that Evergreen had resumed transits, with the container ship EVER EON making its maiden passage after a suspension of nearly three years dating to the start of the Red Sea crisis. Rabie called the return a positive indication that global trade between East and West was gradually returning to a sustainable course, said the line planned further voyages, and listed CMA CGM, Maersk, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, COSCO and Evergreen as services the canal has regained. The independent schedule data is firmer than the statement: the liner consultancy Linerlytica, carried in trade press, has the 16,556 teu Ever Eon and Ever Edit transiting on Ocean Alliance’s NEU7/CES service on 7 and 11 November, and Evergreen relaunching its China–Red Sea OGRD service from 12 November with four ships of 7,000–9,000 teu on a fortnightly rotation.

The scale is the correction to the celebration. Sea-Intelligence data carried in trade press put around 3m teu of containership capacity through the canal in the four weeks to late October — more than double August levels, but still well below the roughly 5.5m teu recorded in October 2023 before the crisis. On Asia–Mediterranean trades, 70–80% of westbound capacity and 80–90% of eastbound is expected to route via Suez in November and December, and Premier Alliance will send two more Asia–Mediterranean services through from November after returning FE1 and IOX/INX. Revenue tracks the same partial curve: $4.67bn in FY2025/26, up 23% against the $7.2bn of FY2023/24, which itself had fallen 23.4%; $505m in July, up 42% and the highest month since December 2023; $567.1m in August, up 56.7% on a year earlier, with 1,358 vessels against 1,070. Rabie has said he expects $5.8bn–$6bn for full-year 2026.

Assessment: The Evergreen transit is an event; the “full return” around it is a forecast, and the schedules it rests on are four ships and two services. Note what is driving the recovery in the trade accounts — rerouting after the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping. Cairo’s hard-currency earner is being refilled by someone else’s war, as it was emptied by someone else’s war, and the same escalation that fills it is what the stockpile order upstairs is hedging against. Treat the state’s own arithmetic carefully: Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly put canal revenue at about $4.4bn on 4 October while the canal authority reported $4.67bn for the fiscal year to June, and described a pre-crisis annual figure of about $10bn falling to $3.3bn.

Egypt’s reserves hit $57.5bn as the monthly gain turns out to be gold moving against dollars

The central bank’s provisional October data shows a $151.6m headline rise. Underneath it, foreign currency holdings rose $768m and the value of gold fell $613m.

Net international reserves rose to $57.4998bn at end-October from $57.3482bn at end-September, a gain of about $151.6m, or 0.26%, on the Central Bank of Egypt’s provisional release of Thursday 5 November. The stock is up about $6.05bn since the start of 2026, from $51.45bn at end-December 2025, and up about $7.43bn or 14.8% on the $50.07bn of end-October 2025. The composition is the part most outlets buried: foreign currency holdings increased by $768m to $40.06bn in October while the value of gold reserves declined by $613m to $16.84bn. Governor Hassan Abdalla — spelled Abdallah by some Egyptian outlets — told a financial markets conference on Friday that reserves had reached a record $57.5bn, reaffirmed commitment to a flexible exchange rate determined by market mechanisms, and said the banking sector’s net foreign assets had risen to their highest level since 2011 while inflation had declined.

The inflow behind the number is identifiable: central bank figures reported on 13 October put remittances at about $33.9bn in January–August 2026, up 27.2% year-on-year. The caution is on the record too, if thinly sourced — the economist Iten El Marghoushy, quoted by the small Egyptian business outlet SEE without institutional affiliation, said reserve resilience remains dependent on foreign currency inflows and exchange rate developments. The clock on the other side of the balance sheet is the Fund’s. Reuters reported on 29 October that the IMF said its current mission to Egypt aims to reach a staff-level agreement and take it to the executive board before mid-December. “The goal of these reforms is to support stronger, more private sector-led growth in Egypt,” the IMF’s director of communications, Julie Kozack, said at the 29 October briefing. The Fund has cautioned that structural reform implementation has been uneven, with progress on reducing the state’s footprint, particularly divestment of non-strategic assets, lagging.

Assessment: A record stock of reserves and a lagging divestment programme are not in contradiction; they are the trade. Remittances, canal tolls and valuation effects have bought Cairo the headline number, and the headline number buys time on the structural conditions the Fund keeps naming. That is why Saturday’s two directives matter to this desk and not only to the defence desk: they move in the opposite direction to the review that must clear the board before mid-December. One warning on sourcing — a balance-of-payments deficit figure circulating in aggregator sidebars, and October inflation and rate readings from the same copy, could not be verified against CAPMAS or the MPC statement and are therefore not printed here.