Electric vehicles and batteries, growing production in Morocco

09 April 2024

Article by Rocco Bellantone

Reading time 4 minutes

It was December 2017 when, in the royal palace in Casablanca, King Mohammed VI and the president of the Chinese electric car giant BYD Wang Chuanfu signed an agreement to open a series of production sites in Mohammed VI Tanger Tech City, a new city . the industrial center of Tangier.

Here, on paper, not only cars but also buses, trucks and electric trains and the batteries to power them should have been developed. The person the Chinese company named at the time in launching the investment plan was Moroccan businessman Mehdi Laraki.

More than six years after the signing of the contract, few traces of BYD’s announcements remain. The company has actually for a while suspension building systems. The fact of not being able to place locally produced buses on the national and regional market weighs on the decision.

Alsa Maroc, the Moroccan branch of the Alsa group of Spain, had ordered some of them in March 2022 they started taking services especially in Marrakech and Rabat. However, the order was not considered by BYD to be a sufficient guarantee to start the construction of the plant in Tangier.

The Chinese company was hampered by delays in the electrification of Morocco’s public transport. The strategy, which was launched in 2017, never took hold in the country. It took the Moroccan government five years to find the funds needed to finance the energy transition in the sector.

It was only in the summer of 2023 that Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch decided to allocate 22.5 billion dirhams (2.6 billion euros) for the next five years to pressure operators to speed up the process. There is very little to convince the Chinese to move forward.

The electric car manufacturing plant that BYD announced to build in Tangier as part of the same agreement signed in 2017 is also still on hold as the Chinese company has limited itself to establishing a partnership with Morocco’s leading car dealer Auto Nejma. Since the end of 2023, Chinese electric cars have landed in the North African country, but only for sale.

But other companies do not give up

Not all foreign electric vehicle and battery companies are down about the Moroccan market yet. In 2023, exports of cars made in Morocco grew by 27%, recording sales of 14 billion dollars, as report agency Reuters.

The country organizes the production of Stellantis, which in its factory in Kenitra reaches the capacity to produce 50 thousand electric cars every year. At its Tangerei plant, Renault plans to start producing a hybrid version of the seven-seater Dacia Jogger model in the second half of this year, with the aim of reaching a capacity of 120,000 per year. The French company is also about to launch a new production site with an annual capacity of 700 thousand vehicles.

There are also various Chinese facts involved. Last week the Moroccan government gave battery manufacturer BTR New Material Group the green light to build a factory near Tangier. CNGR Advanced Material is expected to build a factory in Jorf Lasfar, 100 kilometers south of Casablanca. Gotion is investigating the construction of a factory that could invest up to 6.3 billion dollars.

By 2030, electric vehicles produced in Morocco will represent up to 60% of vehicles exported from the country. A big step forward compared to the European Union itself, which has banned the production of fuel vehicles from 2035. But which is still very divided on the issue. As it happens in Italy.

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