The Industrial Development Authority recently announced that it will introduce competition in the tobacco market in Egypt on May,2021
Promoting competition is a key factor for economic growth. It allows companies to compete and discover better operating procedures to enhance their economic performance. A properly functioning competitive environment attracts private investors from around the world as it is the supreme goal of competition policy to eradicate barriers to entry.
Egypt has announced that it will introduce competition to a sector that enjoyed in the past substantial isolation and benefited from wide protectionism policies. The Industrial Development Authority recently announced that it will introduce competition in the tobacco market in Egypt. It announced that it will grant the first-ever private license to manufacture tobacco and tobacco products in a bid to break the historical public monopoly incumbent Eastern Company SAE (“EASTERN COMPANY”).
The new license comes with certain conditions. Primarily, it allows Eastern Company to become a minority shareholder in the new competitor. Minority shareholders are defined as those who hold less than 50% of the voting rights attached to the equity of the target firm. There are two types of minority holdings: controlling and non-controlling minority holdings. Controlling minority shareholdings is where the minority shareholder has de facto control over the target firm. The non-controlling minority shareholdings do not enjoy control and sometimes do not even have board representation and therefore only have financial interests in the firm. If the non-controlling minority is entitled to board representation, we fall into a hybrid category. Even if the non-controlling shareholder does not have the ultimate decision, he has access to confidential information which is the entitlement of all board members. This note deals exclusively with non-controlling minority shareholdings held by competing firms and the resulting legal and economic risks from the perspective of Competition Law, investment, and free trade.
“Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”), December 2017, Background Note by the Secretariat, Common Ownership by Institutional Investors and its Impact on Competition, paragraph 9”