Fawry

But just the degree of fragmentation, right? Like, in one part of the continent it's mobile money, in the other part it's bank.

Countries like Egypt, it's, like, still very cash heavy, though Fawry is doing a fantastic job of digitizing some of those cash flows.

Different countries have different payment methods, so if I'm telling a merchant that, "Hey, come to Africa and launch in these, you know, four or five countries," it's much more work than them integrating something like, uh, True Money in Thailand or UPI in India, uh, which would give them, you know, access to the same or a larger population base.

And that's what makes the, the economics a little bit challenging for, for businesses that they're interested in the region, they want to sell into the region, but, you know, if you're, like, Anthropic, right? Anthropic only takes card payments today.

Many of the companies of Careem and Souq and et cetera, it was a scale at all costs.

I mean, scale was the name of the game.

I remember that to be a MENA startup, you had to be in every geography in the region, even if it was loss-making, because the goal was numbers, numbers, numbers.

There is a concern that in the last ten years, the M&A coming in or the players entering the market was mostly coming in from the West.

But currently, the wave coming in is coming in from China, whether it's basically Kita, whether it's ByteDance, whether it's Shein, et cetera.

And Chinese companies in general, they tend not to acquire.

They tend to come in organically.

So that actually creates a risk of even less M&A going forward and just companies organically losing market share to these very aggressive Chinese entrants.