January
As the Tunisian revolution was underway, the Egyptian bourse quickly started feeling the heat with the benchmark index EGX 30 sliding to an 11-week low of 6,645 points on January 19. With the onset of the Tahrir protests on January 25, the bourse continued to slide the next day and lost 6% of its value to close at 6,310 points. The market then slumped on January 27, losing 10.3% of its value as it became clear that the protests would continue. Regulators were left with no choice but to shut down the market.

February
The January 25 Revolution continued into February with the economy effectively on hold. Following the January 28 attack on Tahrir Square, the Central Bank of Egypt ordered the stock market and banks to close indefinitely. With no means of conducting financial transactions, public- and private-sector companies saw their operations come to a complete halt. Egyptians began taking the security of their neighborhoods into their own hands as the nation’s policeforce withdrew from their posts and over 25,000 prisoners escaped from local prisons or allegdely let loose. After 16 days of protests, labor strikes across all sectors of the economy erupted, which dissembled the joints of the regime and led to the ousting of Mubarak two days later on February 11.

March
On March 17, the long-awaited merger between Russia’s telecom giant Vimpelcom and Naguib Sawiris’s Weather Investments was a done deal after a 53% vote in favor of the transaction during a shareholders’ meeting. The $6.5 billion (LE 39 billion) transaction entailed that Vimpelcom would acquire 100% of Italy’s Wind Telecom and a 51.7% stake in Orascom Telecom (OT), both subsidiaries of Weather Investments. In return, Weather Investments would have a 20% economic stake and a 30.6% voting stake in the newly formed telecom giant.

Meanwhile on March 23, the Egyptian bourse was reopened after a six-week closure that threatened to see it delisted from the MSCI. The market dropped 10.2% in the first 16 seconds of trading before trading was suspended for 30 minutes. Overall, the EGX 30 closed 8.9% down, recovering slightly from the initial drop.

April
Newly appointed Minister of Finance Samir Radwan announced his plans to raise $10 billion (LE 60.1 billion) in international funding to cover Egypt’s fiscal deficit. The deficit was expected to widen to 9.3% of GDP in FY2011/12 compared to 8.6% of GDP the previous year.

Labor strikes across all sectors of the economy continued as workers demanded better pay and permanent contracts, putting pressure on the state’s budget. Meanwhile, with the economy almost at a halt during the previous two months, sources of income for the government in the form of tourism revenue and FDI were almost non existent.