Daker Abdellah, a member of the board of directors of the Egyptian Federation for Construction and Building Contractors (EFCBC), said the country’s construction sector will face challenges in 2019, as a result of a shortage of liquidity due to delayed payments of contracting companies’ dues, Invest-Gate reports.

Consequently, such delays threaten rates of projects completion, Abdellah said in a recent press statement, underlining that contracting companies are required to achieve a difficult equation – which is the completion of projects based on the set timetables by assigned bodies, regardless of delays of other firms in disbursing their constructing dues.

According to EFCBC’s board member, contracting companies have suffered from such challenge during 2018, noting that “lack of serious solutions will contribute to exacerbating crisis during 2019.”

Besides, Abdellah stressed on the need to consider reducing the number of projects set to be launched in 2019, until liquidity crises are resolved and also until the underway projects are completed to ensure that contracting companies operating in the Egyptian property market will not be harmed.

He elaborated that the delay in disbursing financial dues puts contracting companies in an “embarrassing” position among the banking sector, and thus, losing the confidence of the latter in these developers.

In addition, the official noted that the decline in steel and cement prices in the past months was because of weak demand by contracting companies, as a result of liquidity shortage.

Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) said in a report on December 27 that Egypt’s domestic liquidity leaped by EGP 109.1 bn, logging almost EGP 3.6 tn at a rate of 3.2%, in the July-October period of FY 2018/19.

The CBE report attributed the surge in money supply to a hike in current deposits in local currency by EGP 6.7 bn, at an estimated rate of 1.8%.