Mohammad Bibaoune, Executive Director Egypt, Naval Group In A Monologue Interview With Chaitali Bag, Chief of Bureau, ADU At EDEX 2018.(Transcribed Interview).

“I’m Mohammad Bibaoune, Naval Group delegate in Egypt and I’m happy to be here at our exhibition, EDEX 2018. Naval group here in Egypt designs treaty contracts and we have a big partnership with Egypt. This is our big customer in the region, we have signed a contract for as you know, Gowind. it is a corvette. Outvof the  four, one within France and three other will be within Egypt, and one frigate frame and two PPC helicopters are also there. And here in Egypt we deliver the two first class ship frames and two helicopter Mistral and also the first of class of corvette Gowind, in September of 2016 , last year, and these corvettes are now in Egypt for more than one year. 

For the three corvettes in Alexandria shipyard, we built the first one, and it was the first ship, a Kansai complex ship built in Egypt military. This is the first corvette and the Egyptian government and the navy were proud of this realisation. The first, what you call it, launching, it was 6th September, in Alexandria, and now this first corvette, Alexandria shipyard, they realised that approximately 80% of the works and the trial at sea would be at the end of this year, and in order to satisfy our customer we created a new subsidiary in Alexandria, we call it ANMI, Alexandria Naval for maintenance and industry in Alexandria. This subsidiary will be near to our customer and we will realise all the issues, maintenance for corvette and this is the first step.

We are at EDEX because the Egyptian navy is the big customer in Africa for naval group and we enter in a long partnership with Egyptian navy and as you can see at the front office, we are in partnership for sovereignty of the navy and we are here to, what we call it, domesticate, it means that we will be here with our subsidiary not only business from France but we create a new subsidiary here, it is a subsidiary here, which is an Egyptian company. We will start with maybe 80% French personnel in the beginning and 20% Egyptian navy. But after that, we hope that after two, three, four years approximately 100% of the personnel will be Egyptian.”