Industry & Mining

Signs of recovery have lately emerged in Morocco’s industrial sector, which has been affected by a slowdown in trade in recent years – growth in value-added processing (excluding oil and refining) rose from 0.8% in 2013 to 1.8% in 2014. While subsectors like aeronautics and automotive have made big strides over the past decade, others like textiles and pharmaceuticals have lagged behind, spurring the government to introduce its Industrial Acceleration Plan 2014-20, which aims to raise the sector’s contribution to GDP from its current 14% to 23% by 2020 and create half a million new jobs. Mining in Morocco has traditionally centred on phosphates – of which the country has around 77% of global known reserves – but a new mining code adopted in February 2015 should also help draw activity into less-developed segments such as barite, fluorspar, cobalt, antimony, lead, nickel and silver.

This chapter contains an interview with El Mostafa Sajid, President, Moroccan Association of Textile and Clothing Industries.