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The Elsewedy family began operating a Chinese subsidiary on Sept. 15, six months after registering it, giving the Egyptian energy group it founded in 1938 a permanent buying presence inside its largest supply market.
Elsewedy Electric Shanghai sits in the Hongqiao International Central Business District in the west of the city and will act as the group's procurement centre for China, handling supply chain development and business expansion in energy. The company announced the launch in March and took until now to bring it into operation, with the Shanghai authorities assisting the registration.
The family already runs the institution that manages the relationship. Ahmed Elsewedy, the group's president and chief executive, chairs the Egypt China Business Council, the body through which Egyptian companies engage Chinese counterparts and government, alongside chairing the Ethiopian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Zambian and Algerian councils and sitting on a dozen more.
What the Shanghai office does is remove the middlemen. Elsewedy manufactures cables, transformers, electrical products, energy meters and wind and solar equipment, all of which depend on Chinese components and raw materials, and buying through agents means paying a margin on every shipment. A procurement office on the ground negotiates directly with the factories.
It also works the other way. The company says the subsidiary is meant to connect global markets with local opportunities, supporting governments, private enterprises and investors, which positions it to sell Chinese buyers into the African and Middle Eastern projects it builds.
The business is 88 years old and has stayed in the family throughout. Ahmed Sadek Elsewedy led it from 2002 to 2008, during which capital grew to $8 million and the group added capacity for roughly 3,000 tonnes each of aluminium and copper conductors. It moved beyond cables in 2003 with a transformer plant capable of 6,000 units a year, and entered petroleum services the following year through a joint venture with the Italian company Italsmea.
Ahmed Elsewedy joined the board in 2005 and has run it since. He took his electrical engineering degree at Cairo University in 1986 and has spent more than 35 years in the industry.
The group now employs around 30,000 people worldwide with revenue of about $6 billion, trades on the Egyptian Exchange as SWDY, and operates across cables and accessories, electrical products, energy measurement, transformers, communications, wind and solar generation, and project development.
Its last results showed growth in revenue but not in profit. Consolidated revenue rose to 281.05 billion Egyptian pounds in 2025 from 231.98 billion, an increase of more than a fifth, while consolidated net profit attributable to the parent fell 0.75% to 17.33 billion pounds. Standalone profit after tax went the other way, rising to 6.35 billion pounds from 1.44 billion.
Revenue growing 21% while profit stands still is what happens when input costs rise faster than prices, which is the problem a procurement office in Shanghai exists to solve.
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