The president of the Chinese company Chery, Tongyue Yin, will travel to Barcelona on November 28 and 29 to negotiate the opening of a factory in Catalonia. It will hold meetings with the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the Minister Roger Torrent, and also a meeting at the Foment del Treball, promoted by the Unió Patronal Metal·lúrgica (UPM), to express to the company the support of the Catalan business community for Chery’s creation.
It is the second time that Chery has taken an interest in Catalonia after the attempt made in 2009 by the government of José Montilla. “Then they went looking for them, now it’s Chery who has taken the step,” explains Jaume Roura, president of the UPM and initiator of next week’s visit. Roura got in touch with Chery as early as 2019, through the Chinese producer Guang Ran Zhu Zhang, with whom she maintains friendly relations and who will also be part of the commercial delegation that will travel to Catalonia.
Tongyue Yin, together with the Catalan entrepreneur Jaume Roura
Shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Catalan entrepreneur, who also chairs the Fecavem dealer association, held a meeting with the president of Chery at his Wuyu factory. The Chinese executive has already expressed the company’s interest in establishing itself in Catalonia to serve the markets of Europe, South America and Africa. everything stayed inside pause due to covid until a few months ago contacts had resumed. And the closure of Nissan, with concessions yet to be awarded, has once again placed Chery in the window of potential investors capable of replacing the Japanese multinational.
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In Catalonia
The president of the company will meet the government and Foment
However, Nissan’s option was not possible and will not be possible if reindustrialization continues as planned with the so-called center of decarbonisation as an industrial alternative with the support of the Goodman real estate logistics group.
Manufacturer Guang Ran Zhu Zhang visited the Free Zone facilities in October and a postponement was requested for submitting offers to the Nissan reindustrialization table. The panel denied this, largely due to unions’ opposition to further delaying a trial when laid-off Nissan workers are beginning to run out of unemployment insurance collection time.
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In any case, the Nissan plant would only be an interim solution for Chery. His calculations indicate that in the Free Zone it could make about 150,000 cars a year, but his plans are more ambitious, about 300,000. The Chinese manufacturer could create around 1,500 jobs, according to industry sources.
The attraction of a Chinese producer, interested in a high production volume and, therefore, in employment, is an open question in Catalonia. After Chery’s first attempt in 2009, the Brilliance project also failed, in this case because they expected more public aid than the administrations promised.
Employers and trade unions, for the electric car
The associations of car manufacturers (Anfac) and components (Sernauto), together with the UGT and CCOO trade unions, launched a manifesto on Tuesday to ask the Government to promote tax breaks and bonuses to promote electric mobility. They bet, among other measures, on a reduction in taxes for companies that promote electromobility, a faster development of the network of charging points and measures to support employment.
