Egypt’s gold industry stands at a critical juncture: moving beyond raw extraction to capture the full value chain. While exports of gold and silver doubled in 2025, the gap between shipping unrefined gold and producing high-value bullion, coins, and jewelry remains stark. Plans for a state-backed national refinery, supported by Afreximbank and the Supreme Gold Council, signal a push toward becoming a regional hub. However, long-term success requires a competitive ecosystem with dependable feedstock, streamlined regulations, specialized banking, and transparent digital infrastructure. Ultimately, progress hinges on converting higher output into lasting fiscal revenue, skilled employment, and global market competitiveness.
Capturing Value in Egypt’s Precious Metals Sector
For Egypt, which produced 640,000 ounces of gold and silver in FY2024/25, up 14% year on year, the challenge is not extraction alone but capturing the full value chain. In 2025, exports of gold and precious metals surged to $7.6 billion, more than doubling from $3.2 billion in 2024. Gold has now become one of Egypt’s major non-oil export products, underscoring the urgency of scaling refining capacity, according to Mohamed Ashmawy, Senior Precious Metals Analyst.
This growth must come from the value chain, not merely from increasing extraction volumes. Ashmawy explains: “Raw gold carries only the base value of the metal; refined bullion adds an accreditation premium, while coins and jewelry add a manufacturing margin on top, a value that currently goes mostly to refineries outside Egypt.” Consequently, gold exported today at any processing stage: refining, accreditation, manufacturing represents margins lost to foreign markets instead of being reinvested domestically.
Policy and Investment
Government initiatives are already underway. The proposed national gold refinery project, reviewed by the Supreme Gold Council and advanced through Afreximbank financing with the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), signals a serious commitment. Ashmawy describes the project as advancing along two parallel tracks: “The Supreme Gold Council is reviewing the refinery project on one hand, while Afreximbank advances a financing track with the CBE on the other.”
In this context, Ashmawy notes: “If the facility is built according to international standards from the ground up, Egypt has a real opportunity to become a regional hub for refining and trading, rather than merely meeting domestic demand, especially given its strategic location between African production markets and international bullion centers.”
Building a Gold Ecosystem
Ahmed Shaltout, Expert of Gold & Precious Metals Refining at Star Gold Egypt, cautions that building a refinery is only the first step: “Its long-term success will depend on whether we can build a competitive gold ecosystem around it.” He argues that Egypt already has several of the necessary building blocks, including mining activity, refining expertise, jewelry manufacturing, strong domestic demand, and its location between Africa and the Middle East.
Moreover, he emphasizes the need for reliable supply, not only from Egyptian mines. “A refinery needs a reliable supply of gold. Egyptian mines can provide part, but to gain regional importance Egypt must also attract African feedstock, refine locally, and serve domestic or export markets.,” he notes.
Efficiency in Bullion trade
Shaltout stresses that even seemingly minor charges such as 0.1% banking commissions or 0.25% customs clearance fees become commercially significant in high‑value gold shipments. Without regulatory efficiency, Egypt risks losing competitiveness. “From an investor’s perspective, I believe regulatory efficiency, specialization and certainty can be even more important than conventional tax incentives,” he says.
He calls for specialized frameworks, including bonded refining and temporary admission mechanisms, to attract regional feedstock. This is crucial, he explains, because “one of the challenges we experience in practice is a gap between some conventional banking, customs and regulatory procedures and the way international bullion markets actually operate.”
Shaltout illustrates the problem through the timing of gold transactions: “For example, a trader may agree to purchase physical gold and fix its price against the international market immediately. From that moment, commercial exposure exists. If a banking transaction, regulatory approval or administrative procedure takes too long, the trader can face additional costs and financial exposure. A delay that may be relatively insignificant in a conventional commercial transaction can become very important in the gold market. This is why I believe Egypt needs greater specialization within the institutions dealing with the gold industry.
The ecosystem surrounding the gold refinery is therefore of paramount importance. Assaying, certified bullion production, jewelry manufacturing, recycling, secure logistics, trading, financing, and digital platforms can multiply value creation.
Transparency, Technology and Regulatory Controls
He stresses that digitalization should support-not replace-the physical gold market: “It is important to emphasize that digitalization does not mean replacing physical gold with a purely digital product. The physical gold remains the underlying asset. Technology simply makes pricing, ownership, trading and settlement faster, more transparent and easier to verify. This becomes particularly important when competing internationally.”
“If a supplier in Africa is deciding whether to send gold to Egypt, Dubai, Hong Kong or another refining hub, the choice is not about refining charges alone. The supplier asks: How transparent is the price? Can the price be fixed immediately? How efficient is the assay? How fast is settlement? And what is the total cost of the transaction?” Shaltout explains.
“Therefore, if Egypt wants international suppliers to send their gold here for refining, we should offer them not only competitive refining, but also the same level of price transparency and trading accessibility they expect from established international gold hubs,” he says.
In addition, digital transformation could also enhance regulatory oversight, ensuring compliance with responsible sourcing. Shaltout explains that “A properly regulated digital infrastructure could connect verified physical inventory, sourcing documentation, assay results, ownership records, market-linked prices, price fixing, transaction approvals and settlement. This could improve efficiency for market participants while simultaneously giving regulators greater transparency and traceability.”
The commercial value of such systems also lies in managing price risk. “Gold prices change continuously, transactions can involve very high values, and commercial margins can be relatively small. Therefore, price fixing, hedging and rapid execution are essential parts of managing commercial risk,” Shaltout says.
Shaltout continues delving on the needs of the Egyptian gold industry. “Gold requires strong regulatory controls, particularly regarding responsible sourcing, Anti‑Money Laundering (AML) and Counter‑Terrorist Financing (CFT) requirements, traceability and the movement of high-value assets. The objective should be smarter, faster and more specialized regulation designed around the characteristics of the gold market.”
Specialized teams within banks, customs, and regulatory authorities would be essential to align Egypt’s procedures with international bullion trading practices, according to Shaltout. Such institutional specialization would help ensure that regulatory safeguards do not create delays that undermine Egypt’s ability to compete with established refining and trading centers.
Furthermore, improving recovery rates is another priority. Ashmawy points out: “It comes down to three things in order of urgency: refining technology, certified process control, and technical capacity.” Modern electrolytic and fire-assay methods already push recovery close to the theoretical maximum, but Egypt must invest in consistent handling and assay accuracy upstream. Expanding the Egyptian Assay and Weights Authority’s mandate is a step toward closing this gap.
While the country has demonstrated its capacity to ramp up production and exports, the pathway for further growth lies in aggregating the full value chain via refining, accreditation, and manufacturing. In addition to being an industrial investment, the planned national refinery, financed by the Supreme Gold Council and Afreximbank, is a strategic lever against Egypt’s status as a major regional player in the field of gold bullion and jewelry while facilitating access between African supply and global markets. Yet, success will ultimately depend on the foundation of a competitive ecosystem: dependable feedstock, industry regulation, banking & customs efficiency, and digital infrastructure for transparency and risk management.
