HERDNON, Va., June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- On Monday, June 19, 2006 Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Dr. Tarek Kamel, will announce new investment opportunities for American businesses at a reception hosted by the Northern Virginia Technology Council and several other organizations.

Dr. Kamel is visiting this region to meet with U.S. business leaders to inform them about Egypt's recent developments in the ICT sector and announce a number of large foreign investment opportunities.

At a reception Monday evening, Paul Laudicina, the Vice President and Managing Director of A.T. Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, will announce the findings of a special report which they conducted on doing business in Egypt. Additionally, Mark McLaughlin, Executive Vice President for VeriSign, will sign an agreement with the Minister to provide a name server for Egypt. The Minister will be accompanied by a delegation of prominent technology leaders from Cairo, including the leadership of EITESAL (Egypt's technology association).

Egypt's leading technology companies currently demonstrate globally competitive corporate capabilities in formation systems; software development design, quality assurance, and maintenance; IP-based contact centers, fax servers, SMS applications, unified communication solutions, Internet/Intranet applications; and single-language localization services in Arabic. Egypt's leading ICT companies are currently doing business around the world and are both service providers and strategic partners with the world's leading ICT companies. Companies including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Alcatel, and Intel are all significantly investing in Egypt demonstrating their confidence in the Egyptian market.

For its foreign investors, Egypt has built a state-of-the-art technology park, the Smart Village and instituted Investment Law 8, where foreign companies are eligible for tax exemptions of up to 10 years, unrestricted ownership and unlimited profit repatriation. These incentives have enabled Egypt to attract global players such as Oracle to set up the first MENA customer care center and Intel has built its 4th worldwide Platform Definition Center.

The Minister's reception is being hosted Monday, June 19, from 6pm to 8pm at the Hilton McLean by the Northern Virginia Technology Council in partnership with the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, the Greater Washington Initiative, the Information Technology Association of America, the National-US Arab Chamber of Commerce, and the US-Egypt Friendship Society.

About NVTC

The Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) is the membership and trade association for the technology community in Northern Virginia and is the largest technology council in the nation. NVTC has about 1,100 member companies representing more than 188,000 employees. Its membership includes companies from all sectors of the technology industry and the service providers that support these companies, as well as universities, foreign embassies, non-profit organizations and governmental agencies. NVTC is recognized as the nation's leader in providing its technology community with networking and educational events, specialized services and benefits, public policy advocacy, branding of its region as a major global technology center, initiatives in targeted business sectors and in the international, entrepreneurship, workforce and education arenas, the Equal Footing Foundation that focuses on venture philanthropy and public/private partnerships, and The Entrepreneur Center @NVTC to mentor new technology entrepreneurs. http://www.nvtc.org/

CONTACT: Nancy Rollman of Northern Virginia Technology Council,
+1-703-904-7878, ext. 287, nrollman@nvtc.org

Web site: http://www.nvtc.org/