Egypt's wealthy Allam family weighs public listings for Hassan Allam real estate and infrastructure units

Hassan Allam Holding is considering taking some of its real estate and infrastructure subsidiaries public on Gulf exchanges, the Egyptian bourse, or both, opening a new funding channel for one of Egypt's largest private construction groups.

The parent conglomerate will stay private. Chairman and Chief Executive Hassan Allam said the group is studying listings for selected units rather than the holding company itself, speaking on the sidelines of the BMG Economic Forum at the London Stock Exchange. He set no timeline and named no venue.

The candidates sit in real estate and infrastructure investment, the arms of the business most exposed to the Gulf building boom. Listing them abroad would give Hassan Allam access to deeper pools of regional capital without loosening family control of the group that carries the family name.

Behind the plan is a backlog that has outgrown Egypt. The group is executing about $10.5 billion of projects, split roughly evenly between its home market and a string of foreign ones. Saudi Arabia is now the largest of those, with more than $2 billion in active contracts, followed by the United Arab Emirates, Libya and Oman.

Saudi Arabia has become the centerpiece. Grova, the group's real estate development arm, launched the Noor Khuzam project in Riyadh alongside local partners, a development carrying roughly $880 million (3.3 billion Saudi riyals) in investment. The group also secured a Saudi investment license and opened a regional headquarters in Riyadh, a step that positions it for state-linked contracts as the kingdom pushes its Vision 2030 building program.

Its work there runs deep into that program. Hassan Allam has taken on projects tied to the Public Investment Fund, including work at NEOM and the Amaala tourism development on the Red Sea coast, where its Saudi construction arm is building hotel villas and branded residences in a joint venture with a local contractor. The company has operated in the kingdom since 1979.

The listing plan is not the group's first move toward public markets. Hassan Allam filed last year to list a special purpose acquisition company on the Egyptian Exchange, a blank-check vehicle later rebranded as Grova Venture Capital with issued capital raised to 100 million Egyptian pounds to fund future acquisitions. When market chatter suggested the SPAC was a backdoor listing for Hassan Allam Construction, the company denied it.

That history matters because it shows a group testing how much of itself to expose to public investors, and on which exchange. Gulf markets offer proximity to the customers and sovereign funds now driving its growth. The Egyptian Exchange offers a home listing at a moment when Cairo is pushing to revive its capital market. Allam has left both doors open.

The company is among the oldest names in Egyptian construction. Hassan Mohamed Allam founded it in 1936 as a general contracting firm, and the business was nationalized in 1964 before being returned to private hands in 1975. It has since grown into one of the largest privately owned corporations in the Middle East and North Africa, employing more than 50,000 people across roughly 18 subsidiaries spanning engineering, construction, utilities, logistics and property development.

Its reach now extends well beyond the Arab world. The group has worked in Algeria, Jordan, Azerbaijan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it has built a substantial renewable energy business through Hassan Allam Utilities, established in 2017. That unit has been involved in solar development at Benban in Aswan, one of the largest solar parks in the world, and has signed agreements to develop gigawatt-scale solar and battery storage capacity in Egypt.

The utilities arm has drawn international money. It secured a project development facility from an Africa-focused infrastructure fund to advance renewable projects, and has partnered with other developers on plans that would add more than a gigawatt of solar photovoltaic capacity paired with storage. Those assets give the group a second growth engine alongside contracting, and a business profile that could appeal to investors looking for exposure to the region's energy transition.

Any listing would land in a difficult market. Initial public offerings across the Middle East and North Africa have stayed subdued, with structural headwinds weighing on issuance even as geopolitical risk has eased in places. Egypt's own economy has been strained, and companies weighing where to raise money have increasingly looked to Gulf exchanges, where valuations and liquidity have held up better.

Allam has offered no detail on how much of any subsidiary would be sold, or when. What he has signaled is a direction: keep the family holding company closed, and let the units chasing Gulf growth raise money where that growth is happening.

Investors will now wait to see which subsidiary moves first, and onto which exchange.