Ebro, the reborn electric vehicle brand of the EV Motors group, and the Chinese automobile company Chery have closed the agreement for the reindustrialization of the former Nissan plant in the Barcelona Free Trade Zone.
As announced this Tuesday in a statement, the companies are creating a joint venture to manufacture electric cars, in which Ebro will have a majority stake. The forecast is that Chery will first begin production of its Omoda brand and will be followed by the manufacturing of the first Ebro model, in the fourth quarter of the year.
After months of negotiations, both companies have announced today their intention to present the investment this Friday in the Catalan capital, with a signing at the same facilities. This agreement culminates a long process of almost four years to find an investor interested in giving a second life to these historic manufacturing facilities.
The agreement was closed in China by Pedro Calef, CEO of Ebro, and Guibing Zhang, executive vice president of the subsidiary Chery Automobile. In recent weeks, negotiations between EV Motors and Chery executives had intensified. In fact, the Minister of Business, Roger Torrent, traveled to Wuhu (China) last week to try to resolve the final issues of the agreement with Chery management. "The agreement successfully and very satisfactorily culminates the reindustrialization process. We guarantee a new manufacturer, a driving element in the engine chain. It repositions us in the 21st century, in electric mobility," Torrent assessed. Chery, founded in 1997, is the leading Chinese passenger car exporter, the statement highlights.
The agreement with the Chinese group, whose first signs of interest in manufacturing in Catalonia date back to 2022, guarantees sufficient workload to absorb the around 600 former Nissan workers pending relocation, and who have training contracts until October. . On previous occasions, Chery has indicated that, when the plant reaches full capacity, the workforce will increase to 1,000 jobs.
The reindustrialization of the old Nissan plant has not been an easy path. In fact, the process has been on the verge of running aground on several occasions.
After the announcement in the spring of 2020 of Nissan's cessation of activity, the different parties involved (Government, Generalitat, Consorci de la Zona Franca, Nissan and the unions) launched a table for reindustrialization. The process was less successful than initially expected, although it ended up being completed at the beginning of 2023. On the one hand, Goodman assumed the role of landlord while the reindustrialization project was awarded to QEV Technologies and Btech Group (Barcelona Technical Center), a subsidiary of EV Motors.
At the beginning of this year there was the last misstep in this entire process, when QEV Technologies left the equation after transferring its 40% stake in the D-Hub to Btech, which has completed the process alone.
