Electronic Commerce in Egypt

Abstract

The information and communication technologies have had remarkable impacts worldwide on the emergence of a number of trends and applications affecting business, the industry and the economy. One of the vastly growing waves in today’s changing environment is electronic commerce. It is directly affecting the way people communicate, interact and do business. Electronic commerce currently represents 2% of the global business transactions but promises to dominate the business environment in the 21st century. The successful presence of electronic commerce through the Internet has helped create low cost and more efficient channels for product and service sales through a more dynamic and interactive venue of opportunities where the world becomes the market place. This chapter reflects on the ways business will be developed and formulated in the 21st century. As the world is converging into a global village where supply and demand interacts across nations and continents, electronic commerce represents an opportunity for many countries around the world. Egypt, one of the rapidly growing economies among the developing world has thoroughly invested in transforming its society to deal with the information-based global market economy of the coming century. Respectively, one of the associated technologies in business development and trading has been electronic commerce. With the introduction of the Internet since 1993 in Egypt, today there are around 250,000 Internet subscribers served by 50 Internet service providers and representing the starting point for a potential electronic commerce community. As the Internet grows in magnitude and capacity, electronic commerce will flourish and will have direct implications on the socioeconomic and business development process in Egypt. This chapter demonstrates Egypt’s vision with regard to electronic commerce and its possible utilization in its developmental and planning processes. Moreover, the chapter will demonstrate the roles of the government, the public and the private sector facing the challenges and opportunities enabled by electronic commerce, and how Egypt places the new enabled information and communication technologies as tools that can help in the nation’s development process.