Automotive: Lisi supplier sacrifices its historic site in favor of Morocco

The financial assessment put forward by management is clear-cut: the site has been losing several million euros per year since 2020. Faced with a 25% price gap with the competition in Turkey or China, the plant has been unable to secure contracts for Renault or Mercedes’ new models. To maintain its margins under pressure from automakers, Lisi is now betting on its Tangier hub to ensure production.

On the picket line, the workers denounce a "savage" decision. Teddy Pezet, a setter for 21 years, deplores to France 3 lives "swept away in an hour". The pill is even harder to swallow as the group is in rude health, with one billion euros in turnover and 9% in annual profits. For the employees, this gap between record profits and the elimination of their jobs is experienced as an unfair sacrifice on the altar of profitability.

This closure is part of a deeper crisis in the European automotive industry, threatened by the loss of 350,000 jobs by 2030. While negotiations on severance pay will begin at the end of January, the equipment manufacturer confirms its strategy: producing in the south of the Mediterranean what the French employment pool can no longer assume economically.