Egyptian Textile Industry

Egypt's Goliath Textile Industry, Egypt's 2nd largest industry, is a giant that has been lying dormant for decades, ever since the country's reform programmes in the late 1970s. This sector's potential is very promising; not only for the world-renowned Egyptian Extra Long Staple Cotton, but also for the country’s competitive cost of labour, its geographic proximity and centrality to the rest of the world, and its vast expertise in the textile manufacture industry that has spanned many centuries.

Egyptian Textile Industry has a complete vertically integrated functioning model, starting from fibres (cotton fibres) up to finished products of Apparel and Home Textiles. The module of the Industry functions with both the local availability of the cotton fibres and the imported fibres (polyester, viscose, wool etc.) There is a strong interlink between the upstream represented in cotton fibre and the downstream represented in the textile industry which includes spinning, weaving, dyeing and apparel and home textile manufacturing.


"International trade policy makers, industrialists, exporters, retailers, importers, academics when discussing the future of textiles and clothing trade once quotas will have been removed in 2005, have come to the general consensus that larger countries with an integrated textile industry, including cotton growing facilities, will likely to be the main beneficiaries of the removal of quotas". Ref: International Trade Center – UNCTAD/WTO – Report on the Conference on the future of Textile and Clothing after 2005, Brussels, 5-6 May 2003.