Rabat – Renault Group positioned itself as a major industrial platform in Morocco by manufacturing 402,155 cars in 2018, including 318,600 units in Tangier and 83,550 in Casablanca.
The French car manufacturer exported almost 90 percent of the produced units to 74 countries, the managing director of Group Renault Morocco, Marc Nassif, said Tuesday in Casablanca.
Renault exported 358,779 “made in Morocco” cars last year, which is 7 percent more than the 301,336 cars it exported the previous year, Nassif explained at a presentation of the group’s activities in 2018.
“In 2018, over 400 000 Renault and Dacia vehicles will come out of our two plants,” Renault Group CEO Carlos Ghosn wrote on his LinkedIn in October last year following a meeting with King Mohammed VI and Moroccan industry minister Moulay Hafid Elalamy at the Royal Palace in Marrakech.
The French carmaker has evolved from making 10,000 cars and having 1,600 employees in 2005 in Morocco to 11,000 employees now.
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Renault and its subsidiary Dacia remain among the most sold cars in the domestic market.
In 2018, Dacia sold a record 49,649 cars (28 percent market share) and Renault sold 25,769 cars (14.5 percent market share), according to Renault’s statement published last week.
Six of Renault’s models rank among the top ten bestsellers in Morocco last year: Dacia Logan (13,280 sales), Renault Clio (12,470 sales), Dacia Dokker (12,434 sales), Sandero (11,918 sales), Duster (8,106 sales), and Renault Kangoo (5,544 sales).
Through an extension project of its SOMACA plant in Casablanca launched in October last year, Renault aims to double its production capacity by 2022 and achieve a production capacity of 1 million vehicles by 2025.
Moroccans bought 177,400 cars in 2018, compared to 168,136 vehicles in 2017, up by 5 percent.
In 2017, the North African country produced 345,000 passenger vehicles, compared to South Africa’s 331,000.
