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Planes, Trains, Autos: A Haven From Mideast Chaos Is On The Move | Bloomberg

How Morocco has been able to transform its economy and attract new industries from the ground up:

Bloomberg[…] Alcoa Inc. in May inaugurated a 200-employee factory near Casablanca to make aluminum fixtures for airplanes. On the same day in January, Hexcel Corp. announced plans for a plant in the same coastal city to build fuselage parts, and Switzerland’s TE Connectivity Ltd. said it’s building a cables assembly plant in Tangier.

“There’s no reason recent growth shouldn’t continue,” said Hamid Benbrahim El-Andaloussi, president of GIMAS, which groups Morocco’s aeronautics companies. “Western Europe has a competitivity problem and we are the closest competitive base.”

From almost none 10 years ago, about 12,000 Moroccans — 50 percent of them women — work in the aerospace industry, and Benbrahim expects that to rise to 35,000 by 2020. IMA graduates earn just under 3,000 dirhams a month in their first jobs. France’s minimum wage is about five times as much.

Casablanca’s Institute of Aeronautic Trades, or IMA in French, is helping to supply the workers. It will produce 800 graduates this year, more than double the number in 2015, according to director Patrick Menager. The school is only five years old, yet construction crews are building an extension and by 2020, 1,200 students a year should be graduating…[FULL STORY]

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