Emmanuel Macron was on a reindustrialization mission in the north of France on Friday May 12. Traveling to Dunkirk, he announced two factories for the manufacture of electric batteries. A total of 6,700 jobs are planned at the two sites. The ambition of the President of the Republic and the local authorities: to make Dunkirk a valley of electric blue-white-red.
With our special correspondent in DunkirkAlexis Bedu
The competition was tough. For the Taiwanese group ProLogium to set up its huge factory – an investment of more than 5 billion euros – in the country, France had to pull out all the stops. Gilles Normand, president of ProLogium Europe, confirms this and justifies the decision to settling in France:
” A very big argument is carbon-free electricity at a competitive price. It’s true that we could have gone to the United States, we analysed. But France is working to give us support through grants related to research and development, while the incentives (economic incentives, editor’s note) in the United States are made as soon as you start production. The impact is therefore much more distant. »
In Dunkirk, an entire electric ecosystem is growing and growing. Even more with the announcement of the establishment of a factory of production of battery components by the Chinese group XTC, in tandem with the French group Orano, a specialist in battery recycling. A way out of dependence on China, according to Emmanuel Macron, who wants to go even further:
” With ProLogium or XTC-Orano, cathodes are produced to make lithium batteries. The transformation of lithium for batteries, that, we have not yet secured. 90% of global processing is in China. It’s a competition to have it here, so that everything doesn’t go to the United States or China. »
The president is in reconquest on the ground of employment. In Dunkirk, he tasted a skilfully orchestrated walkabout with the employees of an aluminum factory. Outside, a hundred demonstrators hostile to the pension reform were kept at a distance.
We have already signed, over the period 2022-2030, the creation of 16,000 industrial jobs. It is not simply that we repair the deindustrialization suffered; by the end of the decade, we will have more industrialized the pool of jobs than there was before the dropout of the 2000s.
Emmanuel Macron in Dunkirk, May 12, 2023