be talking on the second segment of the show on the effect of new technologies and advanced technologies and accomplishing business in egypt and worldwide of course we will be talking about youth entrepreneurship and how can they accomplish business using the different applications and specified or made for this uh special target and we also be using talking about using internet mobiles even the social media to accomplish business and on this issue we’re glad to be joined by mr abraham entrepreneurship and expert on smes thank you for joining us and good morning

thank you for having me thank you good morning mr dr abdulrahman and let’s first uh talk about the effect of what you’re doing on entrepreneurship and how could it be able to be pushing business uh climate in any country yeah i think what are we talking about when it comes to technology and how technology disrupting the business i think like in the recent years we all see how fast technology is evolving so it’s just a matter of years and technology are being turned around and people have to update their software and change their hardware and also like the vast growth of the internet and in the best decade that makes things evolving very very fast and i think when we talk about either starting a new business or existing businesses this evolution of technology and this rapid change in technology will have to affect the way business is conducting is being conducted and we can look at this from an entrepreneur as people who are starting new businesses they have to take into consideration the utilization tools and the potential customer base that’s using this technology if we can look at like businesses like the car sharing apps like um different type of applications that reporting traffic like using events we can see lots of successful examples that’s utilizing the um active users on the internet and if we look at industries especially in the us for example there’s a massive technology industry that takes advantage of the availability of users on internet for e-commerce or different types of applications like ending with the application uh pokemon go even like it’s uh it’s an old game that was brought back as a mobile application and increased the valuation of the company by almost nine billion dollars so all these are ways in which technology is changing the business sphere right uh what about the you’ve just mentioned the different applications used specifically for watching business would you tell us more in detail so what types of applications are used to accomplish business definitely i think it’s uh starting from the business creation process i think if you’re doing planning for your business you will find different tools that’s currently available that can help you plan ahead for your business like even developing a business strategy uh hiring you can use internet for hiring you can use accounting softwares online accounting softwares to manage your accounts you can use um like different websites with which is going to send you some knowledge about your industry updates about what’s happening with your industry you can use what we call the crm or customer relation management tools which that you can have all your customers in a single tool and you can even like connect the records to the internet so you can look at their twitter stream their facebook profiles what they are sharing online so all these are different set of tools that businesses can use today in order to enhance their knowledge and awareness about their clients and also save a lot of coasts and have much more efficiency in the way they conduct business right uh what are the challenges that are meeting interpretership here in cairo from your own perspective if we’re talking about entrepreneurship we’re just starting new businesses we’re going to see that like technology makes it easy but in order for you to kind of move move ahead you have to have the right to bring the right talent into building the right software tools or technology tools and i think like the funding space in egypt did not mature to the um to the needed maturity level for entrepreneurs to be able to kind of graduate um world-class applications and world-class uh software and technologies so in terms of developing new technologies it’s still challenging to write to find the right like funding sources for that so lots of egyptian entrepreneurs and companies who start in cairo and find some success or potential we receive funding from outside each when we have to relocate either to the gcc or to the u.s to further invest in building their technologies and eventually it becomes um like a a company founded by egyptian but it’s not an egyptian company so um the challenge of the funding the challenge also the market itself is that the user days in egypt egyptians and the region the use of technology did not mature that much yet the use of online payment is not that popular so all these are challenging challenges in accessing the user base in egypt and monetizing that so usually the talent front and development of technology for entrepreneurs and also the customer base for them and utilization of online payments these are the two sided challenges that usually technology entrepreneurs face right as an entrepreneurship expert how do you think we can or the government maybe can help the youth in establishing small businesses of course we’re talking here about smes or small and medium enterprises how can the government support this yeah i think like if we look at different um environments and how the evolution of small medium enterprises and startups has happened i think there was a little intervention from the government where only like the green light which i see that in egypt the government is doing some efforts when it comes to different entities like etida for example it’s a it’s an entity by the government by the ministry of communication information technology it’s specialized in helping small medium enterprises in a technology space and also there is a subdivision called teak or technology innovation and entrepreneurship center which is also specialized in helping entrepreneurs so these are government entities um that’s working with entrepreneurs i think like there has to be a different way to look at the industry because most of the government decision comes into building um real estate building hubs and and i think we need investments more in the mines and investing more into the culture of utilizing technology looking at very seriously at online payments so things that goes into the routes like online payments and like investing in the talent i think these would be more valuable um beside the investment in real estate and the major projects tell me exactly what do you do in your office i mean uh telling you to project and how important is it in that field or that medium yeah for us we’re specializing in helping entrepreneurs so like usually entrepreneurs find us by searching on google searching for egyptian entrepreneurs or startups usually land on our website and then they register and they send us their problems or they send us what do you want to accomplish so what we do is that we analyze the profiles of these entrepreneurs and we categorize them as well we can see that there are startups there’s high growth companies usually started by people with experience in technology or having someone who’s experienced in technology on board who want to scale very fast so these are fast growth companies that’s called startups there are others that’s small and medium enterprises companies that existed in the past five years they’re already very stable they have a number of employees and things have been moving steadily and usually these are looking for how to use technology to grow our business so the challenge for the first segment is how do we build our business based on technology and and kind of utilize technology as a platform the small medium enterprise which i think is going to be the vast majority of egyptian entrepreneurs they are running small medium enterprises stable yet small companies that wants to utilize technology to scale its operation which i think that’s where the majority of work is being done is that facilitating access to advanced technology to small medium enterprises so our mission is usually how do we bring the best available technologies to egyptian small medium enterprises there are some very interesting business models that make the investment and technology early on for businesses very small for example you can subscribe to a tool for your accounting needs and you can do this by paying a monthly subscription so it’s a pay-as-you-go basis um these are type of private uh companies private business companies support giving this this support this yes right of course there’s a lot of obstacles hindering small and medium enterprises in egypt up till now what are the major obstacles and how can we overcome them yeah i think like to distinguish also between the startups and the small and medium enterprises serves that they be young fast growth companies they have their own set of challenges and also smes do have their own challenges i think if we if we look at the uh the positive side i think ceremonial enterprises needs it we need to look at their structures and we need to kind of advance the business knowledge to kind of manage the business more professionally and firmly and like above all looking at the business opportunities differently so having the the knowledge of business strategy and understanding where the market is going and how to shift towards that so i think um like evolving a small business into a dynamic evolving environment changing the market and changing with the technology and that’s where the opportunities lies for a majority of these small businesses of course there will be challenges when it comes to funding do you want to scale their operation and you want to like find external funding there are some challenges there there are challenges in finding and retaining the right talent for them so all these are challenges that exist for small medium enterprises but we look at if things are going well on the technology in an innovation market front you’re going to always find a solution to these kind of challenges right mr abdulrahman magdie entrepreneurship expert many thanks for joining us sir thank you thank you for coming and i guess this brings us to the end of this edition of the breakfast show my name is tina and all the pleasure to have with me ramsey for saturday morning partners until we see you again tomorrow have a great day [Music]

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