'It does not really make sense to have separate companies,' says Magda el-Sabee, chief executive officer of the holding company.

'It makes more sense to IPO one big company.'

The restructured business should be able to compete more effectively for a larger share of Egypt's booming IT outsourcing sector, which is forecast to generate more than $1,000 million in revenues a year by 2010.

The largest of the five businesses is Orascom Technology Solutions (OTS), which supplies the software needed to run contact centres. Summit also holds Qeemah, a distributor of business software for the US' Oracle, and Opensoft, which distributes Microsoft's Great Plains software and is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.

Orascom Technology Training (OTT), a training business, and International Integrated Solutions, which implements hardware from US networking giant Cisco, are the other two firms involved.

Summit expects to generate revenues of£E 360 million-400 million ($65.6 million-72.9 million) in 2007, up at least 20 per cent on 2006.

The local Orascom Telecom owns 61 per cent of Summit, with the remaining 39 per cent belonging to Japan's Sumitomo.