As President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi opened the Cairo ICT 2017 Fair on 3 December 2017, Minister of Information and Communication Technology Yasser al-Qadi handed him the first specimen of Egyptian made smart phone.
The phone was manufactured by SICO Technology, a company affiliated to the ICT Ministry. It was produced at SICO’s plant in Assiut, some 350km south of Cairo; the plant has the capacity of producing 1.8 million phones a year. The company’s technical centres will be located in Cairo, Giza, Alexandria, Assiut, Sharkiya and Luxor governorates.
According to SICO CEO Muhammad Salem, the percentage of the local component in the mobile phone is 45 per cent, including the motherboard and the touch screen. The foreign component in the device, he said, is provided in partnership with China.
Nilex, which adopts an Android operating system, is expected to be priced at an average of EGP 2,000 (USD112).
SICO Technology is targeting 5 per cent of Egypt’s mobile phone market share in its first year. According to the ICT Ministry, mobile phone subscriptions in Egypt have reached some 110 per cent in January 2017, at 98.2 million users.
Watani International
4 December 2017