Speech by Commissioner Šuica at the EU-Egypt High-Level Event

Dear Ministers Badr Abdellaty, Hassan El Kathib, and Rania Al Mashat,

Dear Vice-Presidents of the EIB and the EBRD, Gelsomina Vigliotti and Mark Bowman,

Dear colleagues Ekaterina and Valdis, Commissioners for Startups, Research and Innovation, and for the Economy, Productivity, and Simplification,

Excellencies, business leaders,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a pleasure to welcome you to this High-Level Event with the business community. Today we are holding the first ever EU–Egypt Leaders Summit.

And I am glad to open this High-Level event together with Egyptian Ministers, dear Badr, Rania, and Hassan.

We are bringing together over 400 participants:

around 50 companies from Egypt with over 100 participants, over 40 EU companies, 30 International Financial Institutions, development agencies, and international organisations combined, and 15 EU Member States.

This event shows the quality and strategic importance of our economic partnership - and our joint commitment to deliver.

I am also delighted by the strong presence of you, business leaders. It is a pleasure to welcome you all today in Brussels. Around 100 representatives from the Egyptian private sector including energy, manufacturing on pharma, transport and 40 European companies from 19 EU Member States, a lot from the energy sector.

And we have the privilege to count on the international financial institutions. Your clout and advisory expertise are indispensable for leveraging investments in private funding.

I see some of Egypts and Europes brightest. Founders, investors, innovators, trail-blazer entrepreneurs, drivers of prosperity.

We want you to choose Egypt.

We want you to take the opportunities of strategic investment in this country full of potential.

This event comes at a perfect moment, with the Pact for the Mediterranean giving new momentum to our investment partnership.

But we are not starting from scratch.

We can look back at the successful Investment Conference in Cairo in June 2024.

Some 30 agreements for a total of 49 billion Euro were concluded there. 

And that was a result of a decisive step we took nineteen months ago.

We upgraded our relationship to a Strategic and Comprehensive Partnership.

This partnership has already delivered reforms and investments. I guess Rania will talk about them.

And we want to further scale them up.

Today we want to discuss with you, the leaders from the private sector, about the implementation of our partnership.

Our shared objective is simple and bold.

We want to convert political momentum into profitable projects.

Into resilient value chains.

And into innovation-led growth that delivers for our citizens.

Let me frame our discussion around three priorities.

The first priority is:

To accelerate strategic investment where it changes the game.

We want to focus on projects in energy, water, logistics, digital, and advanced manufacturing.

We want to provide platforms that attract private investors, including European and Egyptian SMEs and mid-caps, not only big global corporates.

And lets further improve the business environment to make capital follow at pace and at scale.

The second priority is:

To develop a future-proof industrial eco-system throughout the value chains.

We share the vision of clean and resource-efficient production, energy efficiency, renewable energies and low-carbon fuels.

We know that we need cutting-edge infrastructure - from grids to ports - that is resilient, digitalised, and future-ready.

Deepening industrial cooperation with Egypt strengthens our joint Mediterranean competitiveness footprint.

The third priority I would like to bring forward is:

To put research, innovation, and skills at the core of our partnership.

Lets focus on the existing joint research initiatives and mobility schemes. They are already building a community of scientists, entrepreneurs, and problem-solvers, and we want to support them further.

We want to scale up collaborative Research & Innovation that solves real industrial bottlenecks. 

We want to give start-ups and deep-tech companies long-term, stable funding and early opportunities to test their products with real customers.

And lets invest in people with a focus on women and young talent.

Our goal is clear: make Egypt a genuine talent and innovation hub for the broader Mediterranean.

Connected to European research networks, anchored in local ecosystems, and attractive to investors because capability sits next to opportunity.

Dear Colleagues,

This event is built for traction, not talk.

Across our three panels,

we will test assumptions,

we will identify blockers, and

we will crowd in solutions.

I would like to invite all speakers to be concise, concrete, and candid - with two questions:

What can we deliver in the next 6–12 months?

And what do you need from each other — policymakers, investors, industry, academia — to get there?

Let me close on the bigger picture.

The Egypt-EU partnership is strategic.

Not only because of geography.

But because of shared interests in stability, prosperity, and resilience.

Accelerating investment, future-proofing industries, and scaling innovation are the most credible ways to deliver these outcomes.

They reduce vulnerability to shocks.

They create quality jobs.

They strengthen our collective competitiveness.

So lets get to work — and make this partnership deliver for our people and the whole Mediterranean region.

Thank you.