Egypt’s ‘E-Commerce Summit’ aims to be the platform for building future of e-commerce in the country

It seems that everyone in tech scene of MENA wants to get into events these days. The latest entrant is Robusta, a Cairo-based tech agency that is organizing ‘E-Commerce Summit’ later this month in Cairo. On the surface at least, it appears that Robusta is different from the crowd.

Having worked with businesses of all sizes in the country to help them build their tech and e-commerce solutions, Robusta has a pretty good idea of the market and they want to use this know-how to launch an annual event that could serve as a platform to build the future of e-commerce in the country.

“We’re organizing this out of sincere desire to develop the market and the industry that we belong to, which comes as an integral part of our mission towards our community,” explained Hussein Mohieldin, the Managing Director of Robusta, speaking to MENAbytes.

The team behind the event that is led by Hussein thinks that there is a real need of having a platform for e-commerce players in the country where they can come together and share their knowledge with each other. E-Commerce Summit plans to be that platform.

“Potential of e-commerce in Egypt is huge but most of the businesses in Egypt have not been able to capitalize on it due to different reasons. We have worked for a very long time many of these businesses very closely so have good idea of the problem areas and opportunities,” noted Hussein.

With E-Commerce Summit, Robusta wants to bring engaging content for different stakeholders from the industry and spark the conversation around its future in the country.

“Our aim is to inspire established companies to embrace digital technologies, and empower start-ups to innovate in the field,” said the Robusta MD.

The event will be comprised of three main tracks; strategy, tactics, and execution that will feature talks, panels, case studies and fireside chats with some of the industry leaders.

“The objective of event is to trigger action. We believe that by bringing people together exchanging experiences and discussing roadblocks and challenges, we can help increase the market share (of e-commerce) significantly. We’d like those players who are not thinking about e-commerce to start thinking – those who are thinking but are not doing anything to start working on e-commerce and those who’ve been doing a mediocre job at it to improve themselves,” added Hussein, speaking to MENAbytes.

The event is going to feature more than eighty speakers from different sectors which will include international consultants, e-commerce leads for different multinationals, founders and CEOs of leading technology and e-commerce startups and companies and subject matter experts, who will share insights about managing different aspects of e-commerce including technology, payments, and logistics.

But that’s not it.

No tech event in MENA is complete without having a startup competition or some type of award ceremony. One of these is always a part of events here as if its a regulatory requirement. E-Commerce Summit has them both – a startup competition and an award ceremony that we don’t know much about. The startup competition has a cash prize of $10,000, which is a pretty decent amount considering that most of the competitions in Egypt don’t offer any cash prize at all with RiseUp and few others being the exception.

The one-day event will take place at the Nile Ritz Carlton Hotel on the 26th of September 2018 and the tickets at the time of writing are priced at 1400 EGP (~$80).

The intention behind E-Commerce Summit is great and it seems that their team has been putting a lot of efforts into making it a success but to know if they become a part of noise being just another event or standout as a winner that offers real value to attendees, we’ll have to wait.

You can learn more about the event and buy tickets here.