Egypt hails new ‘furniture city’ near mouth of Nile

DAMIETTA: Egypt has built a multi-billion-pound “furniture city” near the mouth of the Nile, a pilot for a series of industry mega-hubs it wants to throw up across the nation, but it could face a struggle to populate it.

The sprawling industrial park, inaugurated in December, is 10 km outside the port city of Damietta, long the centre of Egypt’s once-flourishing but now languishing furniture trade.

The aim of the 3.6 billion pound ($230 million) project, and the other planned specialised parks, is to boost economic growth and create jobs badly needed in a country where about a third of the 100 million people live in poverty.

The idea is “to gather all the furniture makers and workshop owners to increase production and exports,” said Bassem Nabil, chief executive of the Damietta Furniture City.

However, only 400 of the 1,400 newly built workshops have been sold so far.

“There is not a worker among us who will go to that city over there,” said Othman Khalifa, the owner of a carpentry workshop in an old neighbourhood of Damietta. “They should have first come and consulted the people.”

At least half a dozen craftsmen who spoke to Reuters said they would not move to the new city, citing the proximity of their current workshops to their homes and, at 300,000 pounds to be paid over 10 years to buy a workshop, the relatively high costs of being based in the new city. “What’s in it for us?” asked one, who declined to be named.

However Osama Saleh, chairman of the state investment firm Ayady, which helped lead the project, pointed out that it was still early days. He said the new city hoped to sell the remaining 1,000 workshops over the next two years and predicted the city would create 100,000 jobs within four years.

Saleh, also chairman of the furniture city, said the park had space for 157 big factories too.

Aesthetically, the new park is a far cry from Damietta’s traditional furniture quarter, where workshops lie in a dense warren of narrow lanes, often directly under the apartments of their owners and amid the din of table saws and machine lathes. Sawdust and scraps of wood lie scattered about.

The furniture city stretches for 1.39 million square metres, filled with beige and orange concrete workshops trimmed with aluminium siding, resembling car garages built side-by-side.

At the inauguration ceremony in December, President Abdel-fattah Al Sisi had himself expressed surprise that demand for workshops was not stronger.

The furniture industry has been in decline for some 20 or 30 years, hit by changing tastes and cheaper imports from Turkey and China, as well as depressed consumer spending.