Tangier Tech: China’s GATD Moves Its 105 Million Euro Forging Plant From Slovakia

hinese forging group Guizhou Aviation Technical Development (GATD), listed in Shanghai, will build in Morocco the plant it had planned for Slovakia. Its board approved on October 8 the transfer of the project to the Mohammed VI Tangier Tech City, according to the notice the group published the next day. The budget remains capped at 105 million euros, some 862 million yuan, funded from its own resources and money still to be raised: forging lines for industrial equipment parts, with their workshops and facilities. The site will be run by a company provisionally named Atlas Advanced Materials, and GATD will pay 300 million yuan in installments into its subsidiary Sichuan Delan Hangyu, a wholly owned unit of which will carry out the Moroccan project.

The reason given is administrative. In Slovakia, review procedures added along the way by local authorities stretched approval times so far that the schedule had become uncertain, while the project, approved in February, had never entered construction; the Slovak subsidiary will be dissolved. In Morocco, GATD says it obtained assurances from the authorities that no additional procedure would be required. Nothing is settled yet: the investment still awaits clearance from Chinese authorities, a building permit and the registration of the Moroccan company, and the group has signed only a letter of intent for the land. Its subsidiary Delan Hangyu, a ring-forging supplier to the major civil engine makers, will give the measure of what Tangier Tech can expect from this new neighbor.

Photo: Hugo LUC, CC BY-SA 4.0.