China’s Sentury to launch construction works of Morocco’s first tire plant this August

Sentury Tire, a Chinese tire manufacturing giant, will build a first Morocco tire facility in the North of the country, 35 km from Tanger-Med port, Africa’s largest container port which handles over half of all cargo going through Moroccan ports.

The deal okaying the plant breaking ground and operationalization was signed by the company’s manager Lin Wenlong and president of Tangier Technology City Development Jaafar Mrhardy.

The construction of the plant, to cover a surface area of 200,000m2 and to cost $300 million, will start this August. The plant will increase the company’s exporting strength.

In December, Qingdao-based Sentury said it will invest nearly $300 million in self-raised funds to build an automobile tire plant with an annual capacity of six million units in the North African country. For this purpose, the company formed a unit in Tangier in April.

This is Sentury’s third plant outside of China as the firm has two other facilities in Thailand and Spain.

After the project is ready, Sentury will become the only tire maker in Morocco, hiking the firm’s competitiveness globally. The endeavor is strategic as Morocco is the only country in Africa that has signed a free trade agreement with the United States. The Kingdom has a similar agreement with the European Union. Thereby, tires that are exported to the US and Europe are tariff-free.

Sentury increased its profitability steadily last year as its net profit rose by 6 percent to CNY801 million ($111.5 million) from 2021 while its revenue jumped 22 percent to CNY6.3 billion ($876.8 million), according to the annual report.

China is the world’s largest tire producer and exporter as its output makes up over half of the world’s total. However, in the past decade, the US and Europe began laying high anti-dumping duties on China-made tires. So afterwards, the Asian country started exporting more tires to Russia, Southeast Asia, and Africa.