New hotspot for overseas investment: Observing Egypt's industrial supporting development from the surge in machine exports

In recent years, regional industrial transfer has been a hot topic in the industry. Previously, the market's focus was mainly on Southeast Asian regions, with Vietnam taking the lead. However, as investment in Vietnam gradually became saturated, costs related to land, labor, and even supervision began to rise, prompting the market to continuously explore new investment hotspots. Recently, the market has noticed that Egypt has emerged as a new hotspot for overseas investment.

The main destinations of China's PFY exports in recent years by their export volume rankings was sorted, listing the changes in rankings of major countries such as Egypt, Vietnam, and Turkey. It can be seen that Egypt has always been in a relatively high position. It rose to the first place for the first time in 2022 and has remained relatively leading in recent years (in 2023, it temporarily ranked second due to the short-term disturbance caused by India's BIS factors). Turkey, which used to be the largest export destination, has seen a significant decline in its ranking since it started putting spinning equipment into production in recent years. Vietnam has mostly fluctuated between the 2nd and 3rd positions and has remained relatively stable so far.

The strong demand for PFY has driven the gradual rise of related local investments. According to customs statistics, regarding the trend of the number of texturing machines exported from China to Egypt, a round of concentrated investment began in 2024, and especially at the beginning of 2025, the number of texturing machines exported to Egypt surged.

Tracing back further, in August 2024, the export volume of filament spinning machines from China to Egypt also increased significantly, indicating that the integrated supporting facilities from spinning to texturing in Egypt are gradually taking shape.

In fact, earlier signs can be seen from the development of downstream looms. The number of shuttle looms exported from China to Egypt increased concentratedly between 2022 and 2023.

However, looking at specific categories, most of the growth was contributed by narrow-width looms (with a fabric width of≤30cm) which have low unit prices and output, and their impact on actual capacity is somewhat disturbed. If the impact of narrow-width looms is excluded, the growth trend of exports is as follows. It can be seen that among shuttle looms with a fabric width of >30cm, the most obvious increase is in water-jet looms, followed by rapier looms, and their exports began to grow rapidly from 2023 to 2024.

In the knitting field, there were two waves of concentrated export volume increases in 2020 and 2023, and they have maintained a relatively good growth momentum in the past two years. From the perspective of specific machine types, the most obvious increase is in circular knitting machines.

Overall, as an important destination for China's PFY exports, Egypt has been successively carrying out relevant industrial supporting facilities in recent years, including the downstream looms, upstream texturing, and even the spinning links, which are all in the process of gradual development. From the perspective of time nodes, there has been a significant increase since around 2020, and it began to accelerate from 2023 to 2024. Currently, driven by the strong local demand and relevant supporting policies, more and more Chinese enterprises have chosen to invest in Egypt. From the latest information, this trend is still gradually strengthening, and there are still many enterprises intending to invest. Egypt has become a new hotspot for overseas investment.