Less than six months after becoming the first billion-dollar technology company in Egypt, Fawry has hit another milestone by surpassing USD 2 billion in market cap for the first time. Its stock has doubled in the last six months and closed at an all-time high of EGP 46.90 on Monday, pushing its market cap to over EGP 32 billion. This makes it the fourth most valuable company listed on the Egyptian Exchange (EGX). Fawry may be days away from becoming the company with the second largest market cap on EGX.
The Egyptian payments firm went public in August 2019 by listing its shares on EGX at the price of EGP 6.46 per share. In just 18 months, its share price has surged by more than 600%.
Fawry is yet to announce the results for the fourth quarter of 2020, but for the first nine months of last year, the company made about USD 57 million (EGP 892.7 million) in revenue, a 45.2% increase year-on-year. For the same period, it doubled its net profit to USD 7.5 million (EGP 119 million). The company has logged decent growth over the last few years, but COVID-19 has accelerated it even further.
It currently has a P/E (price to earnings) ratio of over 180, which suggests that investors expect multifold growth for the company over the next few years. For context, most of the top ten EGX companies (in terms of market cap) have P/E ratios between 5.0 and 10.0. It is also worth mentioning that Fawry is currently the only technology stock listed on EGX.
Being the leading electronic payments player in Egypt, Fawry is arguably the biggest beneficiary of accelerated digital payments in the country. It offers hundreds of electronic payment services through its network of 200,000 service points across Egypt, including ATMs, mobile wallets, retail shops, post offices, and vendor kiosks. Fawry has introduced many new payments and lending products for both consumers and businesses over the past year, and is developing new services that are expected to be rolled out within the next few months.
USD 1 = EGP 15.73 at the time of writing.
This article was first published by MENAbytes.