Egypt’s Transport and Industry Minister Kamel Al-Wazir announced a package of incentives for railway equipment manufacturers, including discounted or free land allocations, to encourage investors to build factories that produce train systems, components, and communication technologies domestically, and to reduce reliance on imports.
Speaking at a press conference in the New Administrative Capital, Al-Wazir said Spain’s Colway will be the first beneficiary of the new incentives, after the company was allocated land in Kom Abu Radi, Beni Suef, to build a plant manufacturing spare parts for trains and rail carriages. He said Colway has already begun operations and that the ministry plans to expand cooperation with the company in the coming phase.
The minister added that Colway was the first company to respond to the ministry’s initiative to establish a local manufacturing base for the railway sector, covering the production of maintenance equipment, modernization systems, and rolling stock to meet the needs of Egypt’s railway authority.
Al-Wazir said France’s Alstom has also begun building its first factory outside France, located in Borg El-Arab, Alexandria, to produce spare parts for monorail, high-speed train, and metro systems. The ministry is also in talks with Germany’s Siemens to establish a similar plant in Egypt for monorail and high-speed train production.
The same localization model, Al-Wazir said, will also be applied in cooperation with SEMAF, a state-owned railway equipment factory operated by the Arab Organization for Industrialization, as part of an integrated national plan to localize transport manufacturing.
Over the past two years, the minister has repeatedly outlined government plans to attract foreign investors and expand local industrial capacity in the transport sector, a strategy that comes amid foreign-currency shortages and rising external debt servicing costs.
