Marruecos apuesta por una financiación más innovadora
Atalayar spoke with Youssef Alaoui, president of the Parliamentary Group of the General Confederation of Moroccan Enterprises (CGEM), to talk about the Moroccan National Industry Day held in Casablanca. The North African country is clearly committed to the idea of favouring more innovative investment, away from the traditional and more focused on investment funds.
What are the key points of the Moroccan Industry Conference in Casablanca?
Obviously, this conference follows on from the one held a few weeks ago, organised by the Head of Government, which clearly set out the investment charter that was adopted. This investment charter, which has a horizon of 2026, is based on an investment of 550 billion dirhams and the creation of 500,000 jobs, but two thirds of the investment must come from the private sector.
We have organised the Industry Day and the private sector has indeed been called in. I think the key word for me in all economies is employment, job creation. In Morocco there is a fairly young population that has come out of universities or training centres and for whom we must effectively solve the problem of employment, and I believe that industry is as much a consumer of labour as services.
In the panel in which I spoke, we clearly talked about financing. The idea is that we have to move away from the traditional channels of financing only through banks and we have to move towards more innovative financing, which is, for example, to go towards what you already know, investment funds to capitalise companies. We have a lot of SME fabric, and SMEs need to be capitalised and I believe that it is at this point that we cannot just stick to bank debt, we absolutely must have venture capital funds and we must help these companies to develop.
We also talk about setbacks, after two years of COVID we could never have believed that the Russia-Ukraine war would happen as well. In this scenario, the cash flow of companies with inflation continues to be undermined and so the idea is that the banking sector continues to accompany SMEs, because it is a very important crisis and we see it in inflation. We also think that it is necessary for SMEs to focus more and more on what they want to do, i.e. invest. We in the CGEM advocate the development of a rental park and, you know, in an investment of 100 if the entrepreneur has to put 50 for land and buildings, the 50% that goes to non-productive does not seem right to me, so it is absolutely necessary to go to the development of rental parks.
We can dedicate all our funds to help investment in job creation, that a company gives 100 and puts 50 in the industrial tool, it is not the same as a company giving 100 but without the industrial tool and that can create more jobs and create more growth. So, the workshop we were in was a workshop on financing and we talked about more investment funds, less bank debt, more investment in the production tool than in real estate.
The European investor is very relevant, we are in an international environment and we look a lot at security from a legal point of view, what message can you give to investors on this point?
Well, I would like to point out that foreign investors in Morocco are Moroccan for me, it is a Moroccan law and therefore they have the same guarantees of protection as any Moroccan. And I believe that the law applies to everyone. However, there is no need to know more than that. I believe that, in many projects, the investment charter can be based on subsidies. Let's not forget that Morocco is converging as a 20% tax rate, which will make it one of the lowest rates, if not the lowest in the Mediterranean area and I think we have now also developed more and more arbitration tools. Instead of the classical justice that we know, therefore, I would indeed encourage you to resort to arbitration. It is less time-consuming, less costly and we can reach an agreement when there are disputes. There are all the guarantees that are known in Europe, they are the same guarantees as here.
