India-Egypt: Piyush Goyal to Co-Chair 7th Joint Trade Committee

Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal is to travel to the Arab Republic of Egypt on 15 and 16 November 2026, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry has announced. The visit is built around trade, investment, industrial cooperation and direct contact between the two business communities, and comes at a time when ties between the two countries have been raised to the level of a Strategic Partnership.

The Joint Trade Committee

The centrepiece is the 7th Session of the India-Egypt Joint Trade Committee (JTC), to be held in Cairo on 15 November 2026. Piyush Goyal will co-chair it with Egypt's Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade, Dr. Mohamed Farid Saleh. The JTC has been raised to the ministerial level, a sign of the weight both sides now give the commercial relationship. The session will review how bilateral trade and investment have moved and look at ways to widen the trade basket, taking up market access questions, non-tariff barriers, trade remedies, farm and food products, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, engineering goods, chemicals and petrochemicals, fertilisers, textiles, MSMEs, customs cooperation, services, renewable energy, green hydrogen, and transport and logistics.

The trade numbers

Merchandise trade between the two countries during April to September 2026 was worth USD 5.04 billion, a rise of 64 per cent over the same months a year earlier. In FY 2025-26 India's exports to Egypt came to USD 3.87 billion and its imports from Egypt to USD 2.60 billion, figures drawn from DGCIS. India mainly sells meat and poultry products, petroleum products, organic chemicals, cotton and machinery; it mainly buys crude petroleum, fertilisers, cotton and mineral products.

Business Council and Forum

A high-level delegation of more than 140 CEOs and senior industry representatives from a range of sectors will join the India-Egypt Joint Business Council (JBC) Meeting and the India-Egypt Business Forum. Both are meant to put business leaders from the two countries in the same room to work on joint ventures, technology partnerships and industrial collaboration. The minister is also to meet the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), the Egyptian Junior Businessmen Association and the Egypt-India Startups Forum, besides holding bilateral meetings with senior Egyptian ministers.

Why Egypt matters

Cooperation in the Suez Canal Economic Zone, industrial development, manufacturing, infrastructure, ports and logistics and regional value chains is expected to come up in the talks. Egypt's location makes it a gateway for Indian firms into markets across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, and the two sides see room to expand in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, textiles, chemicals, engineering goods, food processing, renewable energy, logistics and new technologies.