Digital Technologies: Germany Encourages Its Companies to Invest in Morocco

The German agency for the promotion of foreign trade and investment (GTAI) recommends that companies from its country establish themselves in Morocco, which “is positioning itself as an export platform for digital services in the Mediterranean” and as “an attractive destination for the offshoring of German services.”

The first German companies are already established in Morocco, “Germany Trade & Invest” states on its website, and it expects the trade relationship between Germany and the Kingdom to evolve, as Morocco “could gain importance for the German economy in the years to come, not only as a traditional production site, but also as an integral part of digital value chains.”

German companies can outsource their processes to Morocco at lower cost and focus their internal resources on innovation, GTAI recommends, emphasizing that for the Kingdom, the export of IT and engineering services represents an important source of revenue, while for Germany, importing these services helps ensure its international competitiveness.

The current context is favorable to strategic investments by German companies in the Kingdom, which has an investment charter offering significant financial and tax advantages, particularly for projects generating high added value and local jobs, the German agency notes, presenting Morocco as a country that has achieved ambitious goals in human-capital training and compliance with European data-protection standards.

In this context, GTAI highlights Morocco’s strategic vision in the offshoring field, which aims, by 2030, to double the sector’s revenues to nearly 3.7 billion euros and to create more than 270,000 additional jobs.

It also underscores the Kingdom’s efforts in the area of data protection, considering that strengthening this framework constitutes a decisive competitive advantage for attracting European—particularly German—investors to the offshoring sector.

Morocco does not view data protection as an obstacle to growth, but as an essential lever to strengthen trust and international competitiveness, the German agency notes, adding that the objective is to position data protection as a genuine quality asset of Moroccan services on the global market.

For the German economy, Morocco’s strategic refocusing in the offshoring field opens up prospects to help address the shortage of skilled labor in Germany and to diversify supply chains in the services sector, the same source stresses, specifying that German companies, traditionally active in Morocco in automotive subcontracting or mechanical engineering, are now expanding their activities to include research and development centers.

German IT service providers use Morocco as a nearshoring location in order to build agile development teams. Geographic proximity, the shared time zone, and the growing availability of a skilled workforce with command of foreign languages facilitate integration into work processes in Germany and internationally, the same source notes.

Moreover, GTAI considers that Morocco, a pioneer on the African continent in the field of the energy transition, also offers favorable conditions for German technology companies developing and testing digital control systems in the renewable energy and smart grid management sectors.

In the long term, the development of outsourcing is expected to change the structure of German–Moroccan foreign trade. While trade in goods such as textiles, agricultural products, machinery, and automobiles has dominated until now, cross-border trade in digital services is gradually gaining in importance, the German agency concludes.