Egypt's smartphone market experiences major downturn in Q3 2022

Newly released data from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker shows that Egypt's smartphone market was down 73.4% year on year in Q3 2022 to just 0.8 million units, with shipments shrinking to less than one-third of their size in Q3 2021. This large decline resulted from several restrictions imposed by the government on mobile phone imports during the year.

The first intervention came as a new 10% import tariff was implemented on mobile phones in November 2021. This was followed in February 2022 by a requirement for all import payments to be conducted via letters of credit (LCs). Since March 2022, the government has approved a very limited number of LC requests for mobile phone imports as the devices are deemed to be non-essential goods. All of this caused severe disruptions in the market during the first three quarters of 2022.