By Patrick FitzPatrick

Some of our best ideas come from readers and sources, who frequently make suggestions that become News Focus, In the Black and even, on occasion, feature stories. Even the bt100, our flagship issue, was born over the course of lunches with Mansour & Co. PricewaterhouseCoopers Country Senior Partner Tarek Mansour and Naaem Financial Corporate Finance boss Hussein Abdel Halim, two of bt’s longest-standing sources and contributors.

This month’s cover package was conceived in a similar manner after a discussion with one of our best friends in government, who wondered whether we might be interested in pulling together a package to highlight the rebirth of the nation’s economy. With the two-year anniversary of the Nazif government coming up and the World Economic Forum’s Middle East meeting scheduled to take place in Egypt on May 20-22, she suggested May would be a perfect time to take stock of where the economy has been and where it’s headed.

We had planned to invite a handful of top business leaders to be interviewed for the cover package, with each of them highlighting reasons why Egypt has emerged as one of the best places to do business in the Arab world. Everyone was to answer three basic questions: How have your company and industry fared in the past two years? What will your company and industry look like two to three years from now? And what do you expect of the national economy in the same time frame?

The answers, we told them, would appear in one- and two-page profiles in this month’s issue and in a special expanded version of the magazine we will be distributing at the World Economic Forum in Sharm El-Sheikh.

Because April was such a short month (truncated by national holidays, including a string of them in the week during which we are usually wrapping up interviews and preparing to go to press), we invited nearly 60 people to participate. Past experience has taught us that while we’re rarely turned down for an interview, sources can be difficult to pin down on short notice during months peppered with vacations, so we took a shotgun approach and invited a Who’s Who of the business community to join us. We were banking on getting a dozen or so, but 49 top business leaders, government officials and independent thinkers took us up on our offer.

My thanks this month go to all our sources for giving so generously of their time — and to our team of writers, editors, copy editors, designers and photographers, who worked overtime through consecutive holiday weekends to finish the package.

The cover package begins on page 52, with Senior Writer Hadia Mostafa’s interview with Minister of Trade and Industry Rachid Mohamed Rachid, the man largely credited with having brought the WEF to Egypt. Although design factors mean there are a few deviations, most of the subsequent profiles appear in alphabetical order (check the complete list on this month’s table of contents, pages 16-17).

Regardless of the order in which you choose to read the profiles, I urge you to leave Beltone Financial Chairman Alaa Saba (page 118) for last. Alaa, a longtime friend of bt and our partner in the bt100, our annual ranking of the top actively traded companies on the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange (CASE), provides the perfect cap. Once an outspoken critic of how the economy was developing, Saba speaks broadly and with newfound optimism about why Egypt will inevitably emerge as the Middle East’s financial hub.

We are delighted to be producing an expanded Special Edition of this issue that delegates to the WEF’s May regional meeting will receive in their hotel rooms and at the new Sharm El-Sheikh International Congress Center. The special issue will include this month’s cover story (with several additional interviews), the best of our bt100 coverage, and a series of stories from the past two years to put the economy in context for our foreign guests.

Subscribers to this magazine will receive copies of the WEF Special Issue at around the same time as the Forum arrives in Egypt.

Meanwhile, we are proud to announce that the Schwab Foundation, in partnership with bt and after a field trip to Egypt to interview candidates, will announce the selection of Egypt’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year at the Forum meeting. A top government official will be handing out the award, and we are proud to be taking part in a WEF session on the value of social entrepreneurship. Our June issue will include coverage of the Schwab Foundation winner, the runners-up and the Forum itself.

Also this month, we bid farewell to two key staffers who are moving on to new challenges.

Contributing Editor Rania Oteify joined Business Today at a time when it was difficult to imagine the economy going any further south. When Rania made the move from freelance contributor to staff writer, it was just months after fallout from 9/11 and SARS saw the Egyptian tourism industry crater, driving the private sector even deeper into the arms of the recession. In the years since, she has served as our top government affairs and public policy writer, chronicling everything from the birth, decline and rejuvenation of the Industrial Modernization Center to the float of the Egyptian pound, from cabinet shuffles both rumored and real to investigative pieces on topics including taxation in the gambling industry and privatization in the banking sector.

Rania has delivered our readers exclusive interviews with top business figures and helped make certain that this magazine broke news with the soul of a daily and the analysis readers expect from a monthly. This is Rania’s last issue on staff, although her final story will appear in next month’s issue. Rania leaves us for Dubai, where she will become the top corporate affairs reporter for Gulf News, a leading UAE daily.

Also leaving us this month is Assistant Editor Eric Schewe, who joined us as a copy editor more than 18 months ago before moving over to the editing side of the house during the 2005 edition of the bt100. Although some of his most valuable work came behind the scenes as an editor, Eric’s most visible contributions to our pages came in his strong, deeply reported analytical pieces on issues ranging from the emergence of securitization to the future of the oil and gas industry and our August 2005 cover story on how Egyptian corporations are finally harnessing the power of enterprise resource solutions.

Although Eric’s name leaves our masthead this month as he goes on to focus on language studies, his voice will continue to grace our pages with an ambitious series of stories he’ll be filing over the coming year tackling, among other things, the mechanics of the petroleum industry. His first piece will appear in next month’s bt100.

Yes, the bt100 returns in June. As we noted in the February 2006 issue, we’re producing two bt100s this year as we shuffle our editorial calendar to reflect tightened disclosure regulations on the CASE. The February bt100 was based on 2004 revenue figures. Late last year, CASE Chairman Maged Shawky redoubled the exchange’s commitment to ensuring a smooth earnings season. As I write these words, all bt100 candidate companies due to post FY2005 results appear to have released them, and the bt100 ranking is on its way to our office from our partners at Beltone Financial, which compiles the list on which the bt100 is based.

The next bt100 will be on newsstands June 5, 2006. Subsequent rankings will appear every June thereafter as we continue to tell the story of Egyptian business one chapter at a time.  bt