Railway Leasing Giant AKIEM Exits Morocco, Citing Sector’s Lack of Appeal

After a decade of activities in Morocco, the company created in 2012 has just been liquidated by the owners, SNCF and Eurotraction, a fund managed by the German DWS, a global infrastructure manager, reports Challenge, recalling that the group had at the time occupied an underused sector, even providing its services to OCP, to which it had rented seven type 36,000 locomotives.

According to the same source, it is the commissioning in 2019 of the Slurry Pipeline, the world’s longest phosphate transport pipeline (which connects the Khouribga mining site to the Jorf Lasfar processing platform over 235 km) that precipitated the departure of AKIEM Maroc. The market is no longer "attractive", it stressed.

Furthermore, the group itself is in difficulty and about to be sold since its main shareholders decided in 2021 to withdraw, the same source said. AKIEM has a fleet of more than 450 locomotives for a turnover of more than 150 million euros.